Media witnesses to the botched execution of Christa Pike described how the satanist killer lifted her head and asked if the pain was normal after a second round of the lethal drug cocktail was administered.
Pike, who would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, somehow survived the double dose of the highly potent sedative, Pentobarbital, Wednesday – with reporters describing how the failed execution played out unlike anything they had ever seen.
“They went through two rounds and she was still breathing at the end, it was very ragged, she lifted her head up and was looking around at one point. She said there was a spot that was burning and hurting and asked if that was normal,” Catherine Sweeney of WPLN said at a press briefing after the execution was put on hold.
“None of that was normal.”
Pike, 50, was strapped to a gurney in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution’s death chamber just before 7:30 p.m. CDT an hour after her stay of execution was overturned by the Supreme Court.
“When they told us to leave at 8:53 Christa Pike was still breathing. They did two separate rounds of pentobarbital – which I’ve never seen before – the protocol does say that they should do a second round if the person is still alive,” Sweeney recounted. “I covered all of the executions last year and most of the ones this year, we haven’t seen anything like it.”
Other witnesses on site at the Nashville prison to watch the historic execution take place recalled Pike complaining about “throbbing” in her arm.
“My arm feels like it’s about to bust. One spot is really throbbing,” WKRN reporter Tori Gessner heard Pike say.
The killer was taken to a nearby hospital, where her lawyers said she was “being provided life-saving measures.”
Her condition was unclear as of Thursday morning; however, a doctor who was retained by Pike’s legal team as a medical expert said she likely now has a brain injury as a result.
“It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” Dr Joel Zivot, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine, told the BBC.
Pike was on death row for a heinous 1995 crime in which she lured a romantic rival into a wooded area and tortured her with a box cutter – carving a pentagram into her chest – before smashing her head with a piece of asphalt, claiming a piece of the victim’s skull as a souvenir.
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