Botched execution leaves Christa Pike in critical condition as witnesses describe 'haunting' scenes

Christa Pike was supposed to die on Wednesday. Instead, she survived two doses of pentobarbital and now lies in a hospital bed in critical condition, her fate suspended between execution and recovery in a way that has left everyone who witnessed it shaken.

Pike is fifty years old. She has been on death row in Tennessee for three decades, convicted in 1996 of murdering Colleen Slemmer, a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Tennessee. The crime was brutal. Slemmer had been lured to a secluded spot on the agricultural campus. Pike and her boyfriend killed her. A pentagram was carved into the victim's chest. Pike later showed associates a piece of Slemmer's skull as a trophy. The court heard all of this. The conviction and death sentence followed.

On Wednesday, the state moved to carry out that sentence. But the execution did not go as planned. The initial dose of pentobarbital, the drug meant to stop her heart and breathing, failed to kill her. So did the backup dose. Neither worked. Pike remained alive in the execution chamber, gasping for air, looking around, complaining of a burning sensation. Witnesses heard her snoring more than an hour into the procedure, after the chamber's microphone had been switched off.

According to Pike's legal team, the execution team inserted at least seven needles into her left arm alone, searching for a viable vein. Her lawyer, Randy Spivey, described what he saw as haunting. "What I saw last night is not something that should ever, ever happen again," he said on Thursday. At that point, Pike was still alive, still in the hospital, her prognosis unknown. "We don't have a sense of her health at the moment," Spivey said. "But we do know that she is alive right now."

Pike's legal representatives are now arguing that the failed execution amounted to torture. They have demanded that her death sentence be commuted. The case had already been contentious before Wednesday—proceedings had been halted just hours before the execution was set to begin, caught up in legal disputes that had made Pike's case a focal point in the broader debate over capital punishment and lethal injection protocols.

Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, had traveled to Tennessee to witness the execution. She told NBC News the attempt "was a mess." She saw what Pike's legal team saw. She was there when it went wrong.

Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University's School of Medicine, offered a medical explanation to the BBC. Pike likely never received enough pentobarbital in her bloodstream to stop her breathing or cause her heart to fail, he said. The delay in beginning resuscitation, he added, means there is a real possibility she will suffer permanent brain injury. The execution failed not just in its outcome but in its execution—a technical failure that may have caused suffering rather than prevented it, and that may have left Pike alive but damaged in ways that are still being assessed.