Christa Pike ‘Angry and Confused’ After Waking From Failed Execution

Death row inmate Christa Pike woke in a Tennessee hospital feeling “angry and confused” after a failed execution at a state prison.

Pike, 50, was scheduled to die last week for the 1995 murder of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Officials administered two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital.

But Pike remained alive and was taken to a nearby hospital, where she is conscious and shackled to her bed.

“She is angry and confused about everything right now,” her attorney, Randy Spivey, said Wednesday. “She is very aware that the state tried to execute her.”

Pike’s next legal and procedural steps remain uncertain. Tennessee law does not specify what should happen when a death row inmate survives two doses of pentobarbital, and Pike had already spent 30 years awaiting execution.

May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, indicated that officials may not attempt to execute Pike again, WSMV reports.

Asked what she wanted to happen to Pike, Martinez offered a resigned response: “It doesn’t matter what I think. They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

Martinez watched from Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution as Pike appeared to sleep and snore even after the lethal injection was administered.

“It was a mess,” Martinez told NBC News after the attempt. “They went to try to execute her and she didn’t die.”

In the days after the botched execution, Martinez reportedly stopped eating and was unable to speak through her tears, her granddaughter Morgan Seeley told WSMV.

“She wanted to get justice,” Seeley said of her grandmother. “Pike serving, being in prison, was not justice.”

In January 1995, Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Slemmer into a wooded area, where they tortured the teenager to death.

Police evidence showed that an accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, acted as a lookout while Pike and Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.

Investigators also said Pike removed part of Slemmer’s skull and kept it as a souvenir.

Slemmer tried to escape, but the couple caught her and resumed the attack. Pike later estimated that the torture lasted between 30 minutes and an hour.

Pike and Shipp were convicted of first-degree murder. Pike received a death sentence, while Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

But Pike’s future now remains unclear, as Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has yet to respond to repeated requests from the killer’s attorneys and death penalty objectors to commute her sentence to life in prison.

Lee, who is set to step down from his position later this month, has instead only reaffirmed his support for capital punishment.

‘My responsibility is to uphold the sentences that Tennessee juries have handed down, even when it’s difficult, and that is exactly what we intend to do in the days ahead,’ the governor said.

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In the meantime, Pike remains on a ventilator, handcuffed to a bed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, where her attorneys said she is awake and ‘speaking limitedly.’

She now has a ‘long road to recovery,’ her lawyer Randy Spivey said Wednesday. 

‘She has a blood clot in one of her arms. She has pneumonia. She is not able to swallow yet, so she has not eaten,’ he said.

Spivey continued: ‘She cannot move either of her arms. Both of her arms and hands are tremendously swollen, and we do not know what, if any, function she will regain.’

The lawyers made the remarks as they fought to retain evidence from the failed execution attempt.  

‘The state has made no promises that Ms Pike will not be subject to future execution,’ lawyer, Luke Ihnen, said at the court hearing.

‘The evidence that we are seeking to preserve now is relevant to any future challenge that she makes. We don’t know what they have, because they won’t tell us.

‘We are frustrated that the information that the state has is repeatedly and deliberately secreted away.’ 

Assistant Attorney General John Ayers, however, claimed there is no pending execution order for Pike after Governor Lee paused all further executions in the state.

Ayers also claimed that the Department of Corrections has already preserved the evidence from Pike’s attempted execution, including log books, observation logs, medical waste and products, and electrocardiogram readouts have been saved.

Judge I’Ashea Myles has since ordered Tennessee officials to also preserve all of the syringes, ⁠drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and gurney restraints used in the execution attempt.

Pike had been injected by at least seven needles as medical staff attempted to give her two lethal doses of pentobarbital that left her arms ‘swollen, burned, and blistered,’ her attorneys previously revealed.

According to a motion filed after the botched execution, ‘At one point, Ms Pike herself offered guidance on where the IV team could attempt access; one needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.’

Her lawyers stated she was administered two sets of syringes of the lethal drug and could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the process.

During the procedure, she said: ‘My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,’ and at another point, asked: ‘Does this happen like that?’

Pike’s attorneys now say they believe problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.

‘Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body,’ the lawyers wrote in the court filing.

Instead of ‘remedying this failure,’ they prepared and administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringes, they wrote.

The governor has since ordered an independent investigation into Pike’s case.