Harrowing details emerge from Christa Pike's execution as 911 audio released
Emergency 911 calls were made shortly after Christa Pike's failed execution last month.
The Tennessee death row inmate, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital and was released from hospital over the weekend.
Pike was discharged after her lawyers said her recovery was ‘medically unprecedented’, and is now back at the Debra K Johnson Rehabilitation Centre, the women’s prison where she was housed for 30 years.
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Audio recordings, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that the first call came in at 8.40pm on 30 September.
“Per supervisors here at the DEC (Department of Emergency Communications), we have been informed it is a false call,” an unidentified person said at 9.01pm. “There is no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison.”
After a few minutes, a responder said: “Somebody is outside the gate at the prison telling us that it’s real and demanding us to go in.
“They say they are some sort of state official. I need somebody to get out to the gate and talk to those people.”
Pike's attorney, Kelly Gleason, also called in and said: “My client, Christa Gail Pike, is undergoing a state execution. She has completed the stages of the protocol and last we knew from the attorney who is present, she is still alive and breathing and needs immediate life-saving care.”
Calls show that it took until 9.11pm for prison officials to confirm that the incident was real.
Pike was taken to hospital at 9.34pm, while a paramedic can be heard telling the operator to make sure the prison knew they were taking her.
They said: "Just because there’s been so much other confusion, I want to make sure they are aware of this."
The Tennessee Department of Correction has not said what went wrong in the execution, while various medical experts have focused on whether a problem with the IV line caused the drug to pool in her tissue instead of entering her bloodstream.
Her lawyers wrote in a court filing that ‘apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed’.
Why Pike is on death row
Pike is on death row for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer.
At the age of 18, she carried out what a judge called the ‘horrific’ and ‘brutal’ murder of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995.
Alongside two friends, Pike lured the 19-year-old into the woods, where they beat, tortured, and killed her. She was sentenced to death at the age of 20.
While her lawyers argued that her death sentence was disproportionate due to her severe childhood trauma, Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post traumatic stress disorder.
In her clemency petition, Pike wrote: “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Anish Vij