Woman who witnessed Christa Pike's failed lethal injection says 'nothing was normal' about execution attempt
Death row inmate Christa Pike has been hospitalised after an attempt to execute her by lethal injection did not succeed, and a witness said there was nothing 'normal' or 'typical' about the way it happened.
Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed in Tennessee yesterday (30 September) after the US Supreme Court overturned a last-minute reprieve and said the lethal injection could go ahead.
The first woman to be put to death in Tennessee in around 200 years, Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, who was found dead with a pentagram carved into her chest and a piece of her skull missing, which Pike had kept.
Court documents say Pike, her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and their friend Shadolla Peterson lured Slemmer to secluded woodland, with Pike and Shipp attacking the 19-year-old while Peterson kept watch.
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After 30 years on death row following her sentence, Pike had been taken to the execution chamber but hours later she was in an ambulance leaving the prison and headed for hospital.
WKRN reporter Tori Gessner was one of the witnesses to the execution and said that 'nothing about today was normal, typical, at all'.
She'd witnessed five executions in her career and spoke about how different this botched one had turned out to be, explaining how the process unfolded and went wrong.
Pike's execution was scheduled for 10am, but a last-minute court delay meant it actually took place in the evening. Gessner said this was 'just the tip of the iceberg' of how strange the process felt.
Gessner entered the witness chamber at 6.41pm, and was kept waiting for almost an hour before the curtain to the execution chamber rose, when 10-15 minutes is usually typical.
READ MORE: Inside the chilling last words of infamous death row inmates
Pike had been speaking with her spiritual advisor Reverend Mikey Noechel and delivered what she thought would be her last words, saying: "I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is with love.
"I’m at peace, I’m ready to be free. This is a happy day."
After this, Pike and her spiritual advisor began singing 'I Love You So Much'.
Gessner records that at 7.34pm Pike said 'my arm feels like it’s about to burst open' and asked if it was normal, with Noechel reassuring her to relax and the death row inmate saying she was 'trying' to.
Gessner said that Pike was talking throughout the execution until the point where she started 'snoring', with the witness curtains to the execution chamber closing for the first time at 7.46pm.
"She was clearly still alive, she was clearly still breathing and snoring," the reporter said as the witnesses could still hear what was happening due to a microphone feed.
Three minutes later the curtains opened up again and Pike was 'snoring very loudly' with her mouth open, and at 8.05pm the curtain was again closed while media witnesses asked if they could be opened once more as they could still hear her alive.
It was at 8.53pm that the microphone feed from the chamber was switched off, and the media witnesses asked to leave.
The ambulance taking Pike to hospital left the prison at 9.28pm, with her legal team saying she underwent 'life-saving measures'.
The Tennessee Department of Correction says it 'followed every step of the State's lawful, established execution protocol', including injecting two doses.
Meanwhile, May Martinez, Slemmer's mother, told NBC the execution was 'a mess', adding that during the failed execution Pike failed to show any remorse 'about what happened, you know, to Colleen'.
She said: "We didn’t know anything until we got up to the office and saw the commissioner. And he said that it didn’t work ... and she’s on her way to the hospital."
Why might Christa Pike's execution have failed and what happens now?
Dr Joel Zivot, a medical expert retained by Pike's legal team, told the BBC her execution likely failed because she didn't have a sufficient dose of pentobarbital to cause apnoea and heart failure.
He added that it's very possible that, due to the delay in resuscitating her, she will have suffered a brain injury.
Her botched execution comes four months after the state also failed to execute Tony Carruthers. Officials were unable to establish an IV line for his lethal injection for over an hour.
Carruthers was granted a one-year reprieve from execution. It's unclear if the same will be granted to Pike.
In Alabama, two death row inmates who survived failed lethal injection attempts in 2022 were executed two years later via nitrogen hypoxia.
In Tennessee, electrocution is the alternative to lethal injection.
Topics: US News, Crime, True Crime, Death Row
Joe Harker