Christa Pike was scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 30. However, after receiving two rounds of the drugs used to execute her, she was still breathing and was eventually rushed to a hospital.
The 50-year-old woman had spent nearly three decades on death row for the brutal 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, committed when Pike was just 18. Her execution was set to make her the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
But the procedure began to go wrong in front of the very journalists who had been summoned as witnesses.
“I feel like my arm is about to burst”, Pike said as she was strapped to the gurney. Then she pointed to her arm and asked: “Is this how it’s supposed to go?”.
Soon afterward, she appeared to lose consciousness. However, she was still breathing and making loud, snoring-like sounds. The journalists continued to hear her for nearly an hour, even after the curtains in the execution chamber were closed.
“Nothing about what happened was normal at all”, recounted Tori Gessner, a journalist who had already witnessed five other executions.
The execution ultimately failed, and Pike was taken to a hospital. Her lawyers say that her arms were swollen, burned, and blistered, apparently because the pentobarbital may have entered the tissue instead of properly entering the bloodstream.
The case took on an unprecedented dimension: experts cited by AP say Pike may be the only known person to have survived after receiving the substances intended for a lethal-injection execution.
And against all odds, she survived. On October 6, her lawyers reported that she had regained consciousness and could speak in a limited capacity.
After what happened, the governor of Tennessee suspended the remaining executions scheduled for 2026 and ordered an investigation into what went wrong. Now an extraordinary question remains: what will happen to a woman who survived the procedure that was supposed to end her life.