Christa Pike says she continues to experience physical and emotional pain a month after surviving Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection. In a statement dictated to her legal team and released Friday, Oct. 30, the 50-year-old death row inmate said she had prepared to die and had not imagined what would happen if she survived.
Pike entered the execution chamber at Riverbend men’s prison on Sept. 30 and received two doses of pentobarbital before being rushed to a hospital. She remained unconscious for several days. Her lawyers said they had at one point believed she was brain-dead and expected her to be removed from life support. She eventually regained consciousness, left the hospital and returned to prison.
Describing waking up in the hospital, Pike said she was alone, disoriented and hurting. She reported continuing pain in her arms, hands and throat, along with difficulty speaking, and said the suffering extended beyond her physical condition. Before the execution attempt, she said, she had thanked people who supported her over the years and made peace with her expected death.
Pike remains in the infirmary at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center. Although she said she is gaining strength, she described being largely separated from other people and said the lack of human contact has added to her distress. She compared the experience with the 28 years she said she spent in solitary confinement. Her attorneys had previously reported that she could walk and speak in complete sentences.
Her statement followed remarks two days earlier by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who said she remained incarcerated under state law and indicated that her death sentence was unlikely to change. Pike’s attorneys have asked him to commute the sentence to life without parole. After the failed execution, Lee suspended the state’s remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent examination of what happened.
Pike was sentenced to death for killing Colleen Slemmer, 19, in 1995. Both were enrolled in a federal Job Corps program in Knoxville. Pike was 18 when she was charged alongside her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, 17, and Shadolla Peterson, 19. Shipp and Peterson were also participants in the program.
The three took Slemmer to a secluded location on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. Her throat was repeatedly cut, her head was struck with a large piece of asphalt, and a pentagram was carved into her chest. Pike later confessed to her involvement. She was convicted and received a death sentence in 1996, and the Tennessee Supreme Court subsequently upheld her convictions and sentence.
Her survival has revived the long-running dispute over her sentence and whether Tennessee could make another attempt to execute her. Pike said she continues to think about Slemmer’s family and their suffering while trying to understand her own survival. “I don't know why I survived that night. I don't know what comes next,” she said.
