State v. Rodriguez, 371 N.C. 295 (Jun. 8, 2018)

In this capital murder case, the trial court did not err by denying the defendant’s motion to dismiss a first-degree murder charge. The defendant argued that the State failed to present sufficient evidence to establish that he was the perpetrator. The court noted that the State’s evidence tended to show that the defendant had a history of abusing the victim, that the defendant had threatened to kill the victim and to dispose of her body, that the defendant violently attacked the victim, that the defendant was the last person to see the victim alive, that the defendant had been seen in the general area in which the victim’s body had been discovered, that the defendant had attempted to clean up the location at which he assaulted the victim, that the defendant sent text messages from the victim’s phone to another person in an attempt to establish that the victim had voluntarily left the area, that the victim’s clothing and blood were found in the defendant’s vehicle, that the defendant made conflicting statements concerning the circumstances surrounding the victim’s disappearance to various people, and that the autopsy performed upon the victim’s body indicated, consistently with other evidence tending to show that blood was emanating from the victim’s nose as the defendant carried her away, that the victim had aspirated blood prior to her death. On these facts, the trial court did not err by denying the defendant’s motion to dismiss the first-degree murder charge for insufficiency of the evidence.