Tennessee Tried to Execute Her. She Wouldnt Die No Matter What

The State of Tennessee had a death warrant. The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way. Pike was strapped to a gurney inside the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

The intravenous line was in place. The lethal drug was administered. But Pike kept breathing.

So Tennessee followed its protocol and administered another round. She kept breathing after that one, too. More than an hour after the execution began, the 50-year-old condemned prisoner was still alive.

Eventually, an ambulance arrived. Instead of leaving the prison in a hearse, Christa Pike left for a hospital.

Welcome to one of the strangest executions that wasn't an execution in modern American history.

The woman Tennessee intended to execute

There is absolutely nothing pretty about the crime that put Pike on Tennessee's death row.

In 1995, when Pike was 18, she participated in the brutal torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.

The two young women attended a Job Corps program in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was interested in Pike's boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

Slemmer was lured into a wooded area. What happened there was horrific. She was beaten and slashed with a box cutter. She suffered numerous injuries during a prolonged attack before she was killed. A pentagram was carved into her body.

Pike was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. More than three decades later, Tennessee scheduled her execution for September 30, 2026.

Had the execution proceeded as planned, Pike would have become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years.

First, there was a last-minute reprieve

Pike was originally scheduled to die Wednesday morning. Then, about an hour before the execution was scheduled to begin, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay.

Her lawyers had argued, among other things, that evidence involving Pike's childhood and mental health had not been adequately considered during her sentencing.

Tennessee appealed.

Hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to proceed. By 7:27 p.m., witnesses could see Pike strapped to the gurney.

She gave what everyone in the room expected to be her final statement. "I'm going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love," she said.

She described herself as being at peace. Then Tennessee began the process of killing her.

Except she didn't die.

Something was obviously wrong

According to Associated Press witnesses, Pike remained conscious after the procedure began. She moved. She raised her head.

At one point, she complained about her arm hurting and asked whether it was supposed to feel that way. Minutes continued to pass.

Eventually, the curtain separating the witnesses from the execution chamber was closed. Then it reopened. Pike began making sounds witnesses described as snoring.

The curtain closed again. For roughly another 40 minutes, witnesses could hear Pike behind it. At approximately 8:53 p.m., witnesses were told to leave.

Pike's lawyers demanded that the execution be stopped and that she receive emergency medical treatment. Emergency vehicles arrived at the prison, and Pike was transported to a hospital.

As of Thursday afternoon, her attorneys said she remained alive and in critical condition.

Tennessee's protocol apparently ran out of instructions

Here is where this story becomes even more extraordinary.

Tennessee's lethal injection protocol anticipated the possibility that the first administration of pentobarbital might fail. That's why officials were permitted to administer a second round.

But apparently nobody wrote instructions for what happens if that doesn't work either. The Tennessee Department of Correction said officials followed the state's established execution procedure.

It also acknowledged something rather astonishing.

The protocol does not provide for additional procedures beyond what officials had already done.

That isn't exactly a minor contingency when the entire purpose of the procedure is to cause death.

And this wasn't Tennessee's first problem

Even more remarkably, this was Tennessee's second failed execution in less than five months. In May, the state attempted to execute death-row prisoner Tony Carruthers.

That execution never reached the drug-administration stage.

Officials were able to establish a primary IV line but could not establish the required backup line despite repeated attempts. After more than an hour, the execution was abandoned.

Carruthers remained alive. Pike's case was dramatically different.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, other prisoners have survived execution attempts because officials couldn't establish proper intravenous access.

In Pike's case, however, the execution proceeded to the administration of the lethal drug.

Now Tennessee wants to know what happened

Governor Bill Lee called what happened "deeply disturbing."

He ordered a comprehensive third-party review of the failed execution and halted Tennessee's remaining scheduled execution for 2026.

There are now some rather enormous questions to answer. Was the pentobarbital properly compounded?

Was the correct amount administered?

Did the IV function properly?

Did the drug enter Pike's bloodstream as intended?

Was there a problem with the drug itself?

And perhaps the biggest question of all:

How can a state have a protocol designed to end a human life without having a protocol for what happens when its own procedure fails?

Those questions are going to matter far beyond Tennessee.

Somewhere in all of this is Colleen

There is another person who shouldn't disappear beneath the headlines about the execution chamber.

Her name was Colleen Slemmer. She was 19 years old.

Her mother, May Martinez, waited more than 30 years to see the sentence against her daughter's killer carried out. She traveled to Nashville and watched Wednesday night.

Then she watched Pike survive. "I didn't get justice for my daughter," Martinez told the Associated Press afterward.

Whatever anyone thinks about capital punishment, Pike, her appeals, the execution process or what Tennessee should do next, that mother's words are difficult to forget.

The State of Tennessee spent decades preparing to carry out a death sentence.

It obtained the drugs. It developed a protocol. It assembled an execution team. It fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for permission to proceed.

But 31 years after Colleen Slemmer was murdered, her mother still didn't get the ending she had traveled to Nashville expecting to see.

Instead, Tennessee has a death-row prisoner in a hospital, a halted execution program and one enormous question hanging over its death chamber:

What happens when the state tries to execute someone and simply can't?