The man charged with murdering UC Berkeley senior Chris Wootton pleaded not guilty on Monday after being denied bail last week.

Berkeley resident Andrew Hoeft-Edenfield, 20, allegedly stabbed Wootton, 21, in the parking lot of sorority Chi Omega early in the morning on May 3.

Both Hoeft-Edenfield, who was then a student at Berkeley City College, and Wootton, a member of the fraternity Sigma Pi, were part of a group involved in a verbal exchange, police said.

The exchange soon turned violent when Hoeft-Edenfield allegedly took out a knife and fatally stabbed Wootton in his upper chest.

When police arrived at Chi Omega's Warring Street parking lot at about 2:45 a.m. that day, they found Wootton's body surrounded by a crowd of about 20 people, some of whom were intoxicated, police said.

Police said at the time that Hoeft-Edenfield, a former Berkeley High School student, admitted to stabbing someone in the crowd, though he did not know who his knife had pierced.

"(Hoeft-Edenfield) did not know Wootton by name or know who he had specifically stabbed, just that he 'connected with someone,'" Berkeley police Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said in early May.

Hoeft-Edenfield allegedly tossed a bloody knife following the incident and ran westward on Channing Way. He was arrested later that day and was booked into the Berkeley city jail on one count of murder.

Friends and family of Hoeft-Edenfield have described him as a "decent, sweet kid putting his life together."

"We do feel this is a tragedy," his mother, Ellen, said when her son was given the murder charge. "We do grieve for the Wootton family. I'm so sorry, I am."

Wootton would have graduated with a degree in nuclear engineering later that month.

Professors in UC Berkeley's nuclear engineering department said Wootton was "extremely popular and an extremely smart kid" who turned down attending graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to attend UC Berkeley.

Other than the murder charges, Hoeft-Edenfield's charges include possession of a deadly weapon and infliction of serious bodily injury.

The case is set to go to pre-trial on Oct. 27. Hoeft-Edenfield is being held without bail at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.

Tags: BERKELEY CITY COLLEGE, SIGMA PI, ANDREW HOEFT-EDENFIELD, CHRIS WOOTTON