Colleen Slemmer would have been 51 years old if she were alive today. Her family celebrated her birthday just last month.
Decades after Ms. Slemmer’s name became a national headline, May Martinez, her mother, remembers her as a “vibrant and generous presence,” who volunteered at the Special Olympics, loved bowling and was interested in computers. She was easygoing, often smiling and enjoyed roller skating, Ms. Martinez told a local news outlet in Nashville.
Ms. Slemmer was murdered and tortured in 1995 by her classmate, Christa Pike, who is now the lone woman on death row in Tennessee. Ms. Pike was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday night, but after two doses of lethal injection, she was still conscious, and the state suspended the execution. She was in critical condition on Thursday and was receiving medical care.
At the time of her death, Ms. Slemmer, 19, was a student in a Job Corps educational program in Knoxville, hundreds of miles away from her family’s home in Jacksonville, Fla.
It was there that three other students in the program — Ms. Pike, her boyfriend at the time and a friend — lured Ms. Slemmer into the woods and tortured and murdered her in January 1995.
Ms. Martinez received a phone call from her daughter that night, but it was brief because of a bad signal. By the time she called back, her daughter was “already gone,” she said.
Ever since, she has clung to what remains of Ms. Slemmer’s life, hanging the Christmas tree ornaments she made and holding onto the books she read as a child.
“Nobody,” she said, “remembers Colleen.”
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