Witness to Christa Pike’s botched execution says killer should have been pumped full of more drugs to finish her off, as she blasts Tennessee governor for letting her go to hospital

A woman who witnessed Christa Pike’s botched execution said that the murderer should have been pumped full of more drugs, and slammed the governor of Tennessee for allowing her to go to the hospital. 

Michelle Nowell watched Pike get injected with two lethal doses of pentobarbital at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution last week, but the prisoner did not die. 

Instead, she was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to a hospital, where she woke up on Tuesday alive and conscious, her lawyers said. 

The failed execution has shocked the world and drawn more attention to the 50-year-old who tortured and killed her classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995 in the woods. 

But Nowell said that she is fed up with how the state has handled the botched attempt and has questioned why it is still paying to keep Pike breathing. 

‘I think it’s shameful. Everything seems to be about Christa Pike,’ Nowell told NewsNations’ Brian Entin. 

‘I don’t even know why they called an ambulance to come and get her in the first place. They should have had more drugs on hand; I mean, I don’t even know why we were paying to keep her alive,’ the angry local told the reporter. 

Nowell went on to blast Tennessee Governor Lee for his response to Pike’s failed lethal injection. 

‘Governor Lee, he’s only got a few more months left in office, and he can’t run anymore. 

‘And if I were him, instead of halting all executions, I would change the protocol, get rid of all this lethal injection, do the firing squad like they just did yesterday in South Carolina – that seems to work,’ she continued. 

Lee halted all executions for the rest of the year after Pike’s incident. He also ordered an independent and comprehensive review of the state’s lethal injection plan. 

The governor is set to leave office in January after serving in the role for eight years.  

‘I am a Tennessean and a taxpayer, and we have paid for Christa forever… it is absolutely ridiculous,’ Nowell shared, adding that she feels for Slemmer’s mother. 

‘Our state could not even bring May Martinez, Colleen’s mother, here to watch this. She had to raise a GoFundMe.

‘But we have paid for Chista Pike, and all they want to do is talk about how she has suffered enough; she suffered enough, well, I’d say Colleen suffered.’ 

The victim advocate further stated that she does not believe that Pike’s sexual abuse history should have halted the execution to begin with. 

Pike was set to be put to death last Wednesday at 11am local time, but just an hour before, it was temporarily stopped because a federal appeals court needed more time to consider legal arguments. 

The arguments referred to her defense team challenging the lethal injection procedures because she has a history of childhood sexual abuse and neglect. 

Because of this, her lawyers requested that an all-female staff carry out her execution. 

In the end, her request was granted, and her execution resumed – but not without major complications. 

The all-female team used at least seven needles over the span of about two hours, trying to inject the drug into Pike’s bloodstream.

Instead, the pentobarbital spread across her tissue and not into her bloodstream, Dr Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising her defense team, told the BBC. 

‘There’s a lot of people who have been sexually abused, men and women – they don’t go out and kill people,’ Nowell stated. 

‘There’s a lot of people who do a lot of bad things, and they don’t do that.’ 

She also pointed to Pike getting another 25 years added to her sentence after she tried to kill another inmate in August 2001. 

Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree murder in 2004 after she tried to strangle inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring. 

‘So she’s had plenty of opportunity to change,’ Nowell said. 

Pike remains hospitalized, and she is angry about the two failed attempts on her life, her lawyers said. 

Although she is still mentally ‘foggy,’ her attorney Stephen Ferrell says she is ‘very aware’ of what happened to her and doing ‘fairly well.’

‘She is up and walking for the first time today, but just around the room, not very far,’ Ferrell told the BBC on Thursday. 

Pike is also ‘angry and confused’ about the situation, he added. 

‘I think it’s kind of good and bad,’ Ferrell explained. ‘Good that she is fairly with it, but she’s also somewhat foggy. She can lose her train of thought really easily and forgets where she’s going.’

The killer remains shackled to her hospital bed, awake and able to speak a little but is incapable of swallowing or moving her arms, her legal team said.

She is also suffering from pneumonia and has a blood clot in her arm, they added.