Christa Pike’s first words from her hospital bed revealed after botched execution

The convicted murderer who survived two doses of a lethal injection during a botched execution last week is now conscious and speaking.

Christa Pike, 50, woke up Tuesday and has no memory of the execution attempt, Dr Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician who is advising her lawyers, told the BBC.

Pike was able to recall her name and made an attempt at guessing the date, incorrectly believing it was still the month of September, Zivot said.

Pike received two supposedly lethal doses of the drug pentobarbital at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, last Wednesday.

But she was still alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and was rushed to the hospital, where she had been unconscious and on a ventilator in critical condition.

Pike’s lawyers said on Tuesday that ‘against all odds’ she was now ‘conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care.’

‘Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery,’ they said in a statement, renewing a call for Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison.

Pike’s legal team is seeking a court order requiring the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve all ‘relevant physical, written and electronic evidence’ related to the failed execution, court documents said. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

Zivot, who was retained by Pike’s lawyers as a medical expert ahead of her execution, previously said it is unlikely that Pike would recover from the injection.

‘Most people who get lethal injection die from it,’ he said, according to the BBC.

Despite Pike having now woken up, Zivot added: ‘I would not, in any way, say at this point that all the big risks are behind her.’

In an interview with the New York Times, Zivot previously speculated about what might have gone wrong during Pike’s attempted execution last week.

He said Pike has small veins that would have made it more difficult to insert an IV line to administer the pentobarbital, a sedative that suppresses respiration.

According to Pike’s lawyers, her arms turned purple during the execution and she reported a burning sensation.

Zivot claims that is indication that some of the pentobarbital had entered the tissue of her arms and not her bloodstream because of a failure of the IV lines.

The pentobarbital used for her execution also may have been degraded, he said, although Tennessee authorities have not released any information about its origin or preparation.

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat and killed their 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, at a job training facility in Knoxville in 1995. 

The case garnered national attention because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body, stoking fears of Satan worship during the ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s and 1990s.

Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on January 12, 1995. 

She then cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp admitted to carving the pentagram into the girl’s body.

Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.

Pike’s lawyers sought clemency citing her age, childhood sexual abuse and mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

The case attracted attention yet again in the lead-up to the botched execution because Pike would have been the first woman put to death by the state of Tennessee in more than 200 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Officials raised curtains to the execution chamber on September 30 at 7.27pm, showing Pike strapped to a gurney.

‘I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,’ the killer said in her ‘last’ words. She described herself as at peace.

But Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. It was not clear what she was referencing.

By 8.26pm, execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered.

Pike continued to be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8.53pm. Witnesses were then escorted out of the area.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement last week that it ‘followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.’

The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered ‘if the inmate is not deceased’ after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

This was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution.

In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.

There have been no executions in the US since last Wednesday’s incident.