One month after she survived two doses of pentobarbital, becoming the first person in U.S. history to live through a full lethal injection protocol, death row prisoner Christa Pike said she is “deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position.”
In her first statement since Sept. 30, the day of her scheduled execution in Tennessee, Pike said she walked into the death chamber “prepared to die” for her role in a brutal 1995 murder.
“I had made my peace,” she said in the statement, which she dictated to her attorneys.
“Several days later I woke up alone in a hospital confused and in pain. There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain,” Pike said. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
“I had not contemplated life beyond that night,” Pike said. “I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured.”
A jury sentenced Pike to death decades ago for her part in killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Pike and two other teens — her boyfriend and another girl — lured Slemmer into a wooded area in Knoxville, where they beat and tortured her. The teenagers knew each other through the Knoxville Job Corps, and prosecutors argued that Pike believed Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend.
Pike admitted to hitting Slemmer in the head with asphalt, cutting her throat and taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, court documents said.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, had crowdsourced funds through a Florida’s victim advocate organization to make the trip from her home in Jacksonville to Nashville, where Pike was scheduled to die last month. Other witnesses to the execution included journalists, Pike’s spiritual adviser and one of her attorneys.
The execution, initially scheduled for the morning, was delayed several hours as final court challenges played out.
Once it began, the witnesses later said, there were signs almost immediately that the execution team was struggling with the lethal injection protocol. It took Tennessee officials about an hour to establish a vein, according to court documents, and Pike began to complain of a burning pressure and pain when the execution team began injecting the first dose of pentobarbital.
When the first dose didn’t kill her, the executioners administered a second dose of pentobarbital. But Pike kept breathing, and her lawyer said her arm turned purple — evidence that she probably experienced a condition known as “IV infiltration,” when fluids leak into surrounding tissue rather than the vein itself.
In extensive court hearings in the months before her execution, Pike’s attorneys and their medical experts had warned the state and judges that Pike’s small veins and a blood disorder could lead to complications. The court allowed the state to proceed.
After nearly two hours in the death chamber, where witnesses said they saw Pike snoring and breathing laboriously, the woman was taken to the hospital by ambulance for lifesaving care. She spent five days in a coma before waking up with swollen and blistered arms.
In her statement, Pike thanked the doctors and nurses at the hospital, who she said treated her with “compassion, dignity and respect.”
Pike was transferred back to the prison where she spent 30 years on death row and has been recovering in the prison’s medical ward.
“I am searching for meaning in what happened to me,” Pike said. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next. Some days, finding hope is harder than others. For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time. And I am holding on to the love and kindness of so many people who have reminded me that I am not alone.”
Gov. Bill Lee (R) has put a moratorium on executions in Tennessee through the end of the year and ordered an independent investigation into Pike’s botched execution.
He has resisted calls from her attorneys and some members of the public to commute her death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The governor denied the clemency request in the days before her scheduled execution.
Speaking to reporters this week, Lee, whose term ends in January, said Pike is “still incarcerated under the laws of the state of Tennessee.”
“I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts,” Lee said.
It’s not clear whether Tennessee’s next governor, who will be decided in Tuesday’s midterm election, will try to execute Pike a second time. The front-runner, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R), has said she believes in expediting executions to reduce the suffering of families of victims and has called for use of the electric chair.
Pike’s attorneys have signaled they would fight any attempt to execute her again and are working to amend their original court complaint challenging the constitutionality of her first execution. Earlier this month, a Tennessee state court judge ordered prison officials to preserve all evidence of Pike’s botched execution.
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