Christa Pike woke up six days after Tennessee tried to execute her, and the first thing she said was: “Where am I?”.
She was 50 years old and the only woman on the state’s death row. On September 30, 2026, at Riverbend Prison in Nashville, she was given two doses of pentobarbital. She survived. Her lawyers believed she was brain-dead and were preparing to remove life support when she opened her eyes. Her attorney, Randy Spivey, was not there; he recounts what he was told: that she asked where she was and who the people around her were. She is believed to be the first person to survive a lethal injection during an execution.
Why the injection failed remains a mystery. No official source has explained it. Before the execution, the defense had warned that a blood disorder could cause problems in her lungs, and Tennessee had resumed executions after a pause over inadequate testing of its drugs. But none of that has been confirmed as the cause. A judge ordered all the evidence preserved.
Pike was serving a sentence for the 1995 murder of her roommate Colleen Slemmer, when Pike was 18. Today she has pneumonia and a blood clot in one arm, cannot move her arms or swallow, and speaks little. “She is angry and confused about everything”, Spivey said. She knows the state tried to execute her. Her lawyers are asking the governor to commute her sentence.
