The Murder of Faith Hedgepeth: The Trial of Miguel Enrique Salguero-Olivares: Day Four: Phones

So the first witness today, we are still very much in the prosecution's case in chief.

And the state witness called today to start us out was Dr. Heather Waleski.

And she was called by Angela Garcia LaMarca, the Durham County Assistant District Attorney, who did the direct examination.

I've complimented Ms. Garcia LaMarca's performance so far.

She is a very kind of soothing, affable court style, and she's very good, I feel, at conveying the emotions that come with a case, that come with the loss of a beautiful 19-year-old young woman who's just starting out in life and never got the opportunity to live that life for no reason.

And she's also, I think, good at really kind of establishing the case.

I feel like all these attorneys that I've seen do the direct and cross-examination so far have been doing a good job with what they have.

So in this case, Dr. Waleski is actually a nurse practitioner.

She's a nurse practitioner for Atrium Health.

And that company has a forensic health program and she does sexual assault examinations for them.

She also teaches forensic sexual assault examinations to other nurses.

So she's not only doing this herself, she's actually teaching others to do it.

That conveys a level of expertise.

And the state asked for the judge to recognize her as a sexual assault examination expert.

No objection from the defense.

So that went through.

So when we're talking about this, I mean, she actually like busted out stuff that you might see in sexual education, sex ed, where you have like the diagrams of the female genitalia externally and internally.

Why do you think something like that is necessary, Kevin, when we're talking about a case like this? That might strike some people as odd.

We really need to go back and look at the different parts of female genitalia.

Why do we need to do that? So what's your thought on why they might do this?

I think it's very important never to assume that the jury knows something which you have not laid out for them.

If there's something you want them to know that pertains to a woman's anatomy or what have you, make sure you have an expert explain it to them so they understand what it means.

I think that is really well said because we might all think, well, we know all the different aspects of that, but not everyone may and not everyone may remember what might be relevant in this situation.

Especially we're talking about essentially something that's highly medical in the sense that what she is there to talk about.

is we know that there was a sexual assault examination done on Faith Hedgepeth's body.