In her first comments since Tennessee botched her execution last month, Christa Pike said that she was in constant pain and that she had been kept largely in isolation.
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain,” she said, according to a statement released Friday. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak.”
Ms. Pike, 50, received the death penalty for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate in Knoxville, Tenn. Ms. Pike, then 18, was one of three students who lured Ms. Slemmer into the woods, slashed at her with a box cutter and beat her.
In the statement, which she dictated to her legal team, Ms. Pike said she had been prepared to die the morning of Sept. 30. She had said her goodbyes to her loved ones and supporters. She told the people in the death chamber she was leaving them “in loving kindness.”
But then she woke up alone, confused and in pain, according to the statement. She was the first person to survive after receiving a lethal dose of the drug pentobarbital.
“I had not contemplated life beyond that night,” Ms. Pike said, “and I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position.”
She added, “I am searching for meaning in what happened to me.”
The mother of Ms. Slemmer, May Martinez, was in favor of the execution and has rejected Ms. Pike’s expressions of remorse in the years since the crime. Ms. Pike said she was thinking about Ms. Slemmer’s family and “the terrible pain and loss they have endured.”
The execution, initially delayed in a flurry of last-minute legal maneuvering, went ahead the evening of Sept. 30. In court documents this month, Randy Spivey, one of Ms. Pike’s lawyers who witnessed the execution, described nearly an hour in which members of the team responsible for placing the IV struggled to do so.
At one point, Mr. Spivey said, one team member said that a vein “might be blowing,” acknowledging that a vein might have been damaged in the process. In excerpts from a 2025 deposition released in court this week, Kenneth Nelson, the warden at the prison where executions take place, said the team contracted for the execution did not practice what to do if they had a hard time inserting an IV.
It took about 30 minutes to verify the authenticity of the first 911 call for an ambulance from the prison. Ms. Pike was in a private Nashville hospital for more than a week, where staff “treated me with compassion, dignity and respect,” she said.
The botched handling of the execution has drawn scrutiny as the state’s second failed attempt at capital punishment this year. After Ms. Pike’s execution attempt, Frank Strada, the embattled head of the Tennessee Department of Correction, said he would step down. On Friday, Gov. Bill Lee appointed Christopher Hansen, an assistant commissioner at the Department of Correction, as interim commissioner of the agency.
Shortly after the botched execution, Mr. Lee, a Republican who is term-limited, paused all executions for the remainder of his term and ordered an independent investigation into the practice. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate for governor, has said she believes Ms. Pike should face execution a second time, calling for the use of the electric chair instead of lethal injection.
Ms. Pike’s legal team has asked Mr. Lee to consider granting her clemency, allowing her to spend the remainder of her life in prison. On Wednesday, Mr. Lee told reporters, “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts.”
Ms. Pike spent most of her three decades in prison in isolation, until a 2024 settlement allowed her some physical interaction with other women in the prison. In her statement Friday, she said being alone in the infirmary was a painful repeat of that treatment, even as her recovery continued.
“I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger,” she said.
On Friday, her lawyers accused the Tennessee Department of Correction of violating the terms of the settlement agreement, saying the agency had denied a request that she be housed with other women receiving temporary medical care and unlawfully kept her in isolation without an end date.
“A medical need caused by the state’s own horrific misconduct does not authorize” a violation of the agreement, the lawyers wrote in an emergency filing to enforce the agreement.
The emergency request also sheds some light on the aftermath of the execution attempt. Her lawyers raised questions about whether she was getting her prescribed medication. They also asked for a one-time exemption to the limit on commissary purchases because Ms. Pike wanted to repurchase things, including clothes, that she had given away before her execution.
The Department of Correction declined to comment.
Ms. Pike’s long-term prognosis, her legal team said, remains unclear.
“I don’t know why I survived that night — I don’t know what comes next,” Ms. Pike said. She added, “For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time.”
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