I have another thought about what might have happened that night and why Karena Rosario should be the main suspect.
This is important, I think.
I was just reading through old posts on this case, and I came across something that Brandon Edwards wrote in memory of Faith on the two year anniversary of her death. He wrote these words into an Instagram post which features a photograph of his arm, where he now has a tattoo of Faith's initials: "F.D.H". Both the tattoo and the language in his post suggest that there were very strong feelings between Brandon and Faith, and I think this might be the key to understanding why Faith was killed, or to be more precise, why Karena Rosario killed Faith.
In his Instagram post, Brandon begins with the following: "Today will forever be remembered as the day I lost you." Notice that he says "the day I lost you" rather than "the day WE lost you". That's important. Ordinarily, a friend of the deceased would use "we" here, i.e., "the day WE lost you". A boyfriend or a husband might say "I," but those are uniquely one-to-one relationships; a friend would more likely say "we". Yet Brandon says: "the day I lost you".
Then he writes: "I remember your face lighting up when you saw me walk into the bar. I remember you asking me how I had been. I remember us laughing about old times." Now there are a couple of important things about this: one, Brandon saw Faith and Karena that night at Thrill, just hours before Faith was killed; two, if Brandon saw how Faith's face "lit up" when he walked into the bar, so too might have Karena, and this would not have made her happy at all. Indeed, if Karena then saw Faith and Brandon smiling and "laughing" together, she could have become jealous, suspicious, even angry. (Remember that Brandon is the guy Karena liked most.) This might also explain why Karena wanted to leave the bar early: Faith and Brandon seemed to be enjoying one another's company too much, seemed a bit TOO friendly; Karena got upset and invented a reason they needed to leave.
So they went home.
Back in the apartment, Karena would have been quiet, moody, stewing in her suspicion, anger and jealousy, but Faith would probably have had no idea what was going on in Karena's mind. But what would have caused Karena to fly into a murderous rage? After all, not only was Faith her closest friend, Faith later sent texts to Brandon, asking him to come over to see Karena and demonstrate that he cared about her. Surely this showed Karena that Faith herself wasn't interested in Brandon and that Faith was being a good and loyal friend.
Except that I think Karena might have seen the text that Faith sent to Brandon and interpreted it in an entirely different way from how we interpret it. Recall what Faith texted to Brandon (I'll use the corrected version for simplicity's sake): "Hey b. Can you come over here please. Karena needs you more than you know. Please let her know you care." Now, to all of us this reads like a friend trying to help a friend. But what if in her suspiciousness and jealousy, Karena read it differently and saw Faith's text as a subtle way of sending Brandon a secret message, that secret message being not "Karena needs you more than you know. Please let her know you care" but "I need you more than you know. Please let me know you care."
That may sound like a stretch, but remember that the jealous, angry, suspicious mind does not work the same way that the normal, calm, rational mind does. This theory might also somewhat explain the note on the bag: "I'm not stupid" is Karena telling Faith that she saw through Faith's little game, i.e., her attempt to send a secret message to Brandon.
I also have one last thought about the word "jealous" on the bag. I'll admit that the note confuses me a bit, as I don't really understand why someone would write a note on a bag, and I also don't understand why the killer would place it on top of Faith afterward. Regardless, one way the word "jealous" could've ended up on the bag is if in their post-Thrill conversation, Karena had told Faith she saw Faith smiling and laughing with Brandon and that she didn't like it. Maybe Faith said something like, "Karena, don't be stupid; you're just being jealous for no reason." There we have both the word "stupid" and the word "jealous," and it could be that Karena was giving these words back to Faith in her anger and rage after she brutally beat her with the rum bottle.
While it may be somewhat hard to believe, jealousy is a very powerful negative emotion and it has driven many people to murder; for me, the above is the most plausible explanation for Faith's murder at the moment.
