A Durham County judge is asking the Chapel Hill Police Department to find a missing blood sample involved in the case of a University of North Carolina student killed at an apartment 13 years earlier.

According to court documents obtained by WRAL News, a Durham County Superior Court judge filed a motion on Nov. 26 to determine the whereabouts of a blood sample taken by police from the scene where Faith Hedgepeth was killed.

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Hedgepeth was found beaten to death in Septemer 2012 inside an off-campus apartment. She was 19. Authorities charged Miguel Enrique Salguero-Olivares with her murder in 2021 after using DNA testing from a sample found at the original crime scene.

Then-North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, in an interview with WRAL News, declined to say how authorities obtained the DNA from the suspect to match the evidence.

According to the November motion, a blood sample was obtained from the door frame of Hedgepeth’s apartment and the Chapel Hill Police Department used that sample in a PowerPoint presentation on Hedgepeth’s murder.

The filing claimed the state told the court that the Chapel Hill Police Department no longer had the blood sample from the crime scene. The state acknowledged it did not know if the blood stain sample was taken and then lost or not collected despite what CHPD put in its police reports, adding that the state requested written documentation from the CHPD about what happened to it, but it not yet received written documentation as of Nov. 6.

Salguero-Olivares’s lawyers asked for the release of all blood samples taken from a blood stain inside Hedgepeth’s apartment, as well as all tape lifts, latent lifts, swabs and all other materials collected from the blood stain.

The case has seen more information into the crime scene and additional evidence this year.

A July court filing by Salguero-Olivares’s lawyers claimed that an out-of-state witness attended UNC in September 2012 when the murder occurred. The man was friends with Hedgepeth and her roommate, and after hanging out with them at a club the night of the murder, the roommate asked him to pick her up from their off-campus apartment around 4 a.m. The friend said the roommate was upset and had blood on her fingers when she entered the car she was driving.

That filing called for the out-of-state witness, the notice of an expert witness and the request to release more evidence in the case.

WRAL News is not naming the roommate or potential witness since they are not charged in Hedgepeth’s murder.

Another filing in August from Salguero-Olivares's lawyers called for independent testing from the crime scene, specifically a 2-inch blood stain on the bathroom doorframe in Hedgepeth's apartment.

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