Nearly a month after a botched lethal injection execution left convicted murderer Christa Pike alive, newly released emergency call transcripts and audio have pulled back the curtain on the miscommunication and systemic disarray that marred the September 30 attempt at Riverbend Prison in Tennessee.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the brutal 1995 torture and killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a college student who was killed by Pike and her then-underage boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp while the pair were incarcerated together. Shipp avoided the death penalty due to his age at the time of the crime and remains in prison to this day.
On the evening of the attempted execution, correctional staff administered two full doses of pentobarbital to Pike, but an hour after the injection was completed, she had not died. A first call for emergency medical assistance placed at 8:40 p.m. local time hit an immediate barrier: the caller, who was in the execution chamber itself, could not provide the prearranged verification code required by first responders, leading dispatchers to initially label the alert as a hoax. Compounding the chaos, senior central command staff at the prison told dispatch 27 minutes later that they would have been the authorized party to place an emergency call during an execution, and that they had not issued any such alert.
It was not until 9:11 p.m. — nearly 30 minutes after the first call for help — that prison leadership confirmed the original request was legitimate, clearing the way for emergency responders to enter the facility. As Pike was being transported to a local hospital 23 minutes later, one responding medic can be heard on a follow-up call urging colleagues to confirm the transportation destination with prison officials, noting “there’s been so much other confusion” surrounding the incident.
The Associated Press was the first outlet to obtain the full audio of the calls, which were later published in their entirety by the Nashville Banner. The records confirm long-suspected communication gaps between frontline execution staff and senior prison command that likely delayed urgent medical care for Pike after the procedure failed.
Pike’s legal team has put forward one plausible explanation for the failed execution: they argue the pentobarbital did not enter Pike’s bloodstream in a lethal quantity, instead spreading under her skin. The Tennessee Department of Corrections has not yet released its own assessment of what caused the procedure to go wrong, and the BBC’s request for comment has not yet received a response.
Pike, who is believed to be the first person in U.S. history to survive a court-ordered lethal injection execution attempt, has since been discharged from the hospital and returned to state prison. Her legal team has warned that despite regaining the ability to walk and talk, she faces a lengthy recovery period, and it remains unclear what ongoing medical care she is receiving in custody.
The botched execution has thrown Tennessee’s death penalty protocol into upheaval. The head of the state’s Department of Corrections has announced his resignation in the wake of the incident, and Governor Bill Lee has suspended all scheduled executions for the remainder of the year while a formal investigation is conducted.
The fallout has also split state stakeholders: some Republican lawmakers have pushed for the state to attempt a second execution using a different method, while Pike’s legal team is lobbying Governor Lee to commute her death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For her part, Slemmer’s mother, who was a vocal advocate for carrying out Pike’s death sentence, has called the botched procedure nothing less than a “mess.”