&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Christa Pike was snoring after two lethal injections. Then asked a question no one could answer")
Christa Pike, who would have become the first woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years to be executed, survived two lethal injections on Wednesday (Sep 30). After the first lethal drug cocktail failed to work, she was given a second round. But she somehow managed to survive the highly potent sedative, Pentobarbital. Media personnel who were there to see the satanist killer's execution have revealed what Pike said after she was given the second shot.
Watching an unexpected scene unfolding in front of them left the witnesses shocked. After the second shot, Pike asked if the pain was normal. "They went through two rounds, and she was still breathing at the end; it was very ragged. She lifted her head up and was looking around at one point," Catherine Sweeney of WPLN said at a press briefing.
"She said there was a spot that was burning and hurting and asked if that was normal,” Sweeney added. “None of that was normal.” Others who were present said that Pike complained about "throbbing" in her arm. “My arm feels like it’s about to bust. One spot is really throbbing,” WKRN reporter Tori Gessner recalled. Witnesses and attorneys also said that Pike did not become unconscious and was heard loudly snoring and breathing behind the closed viewing curtains.
The Supreme Court lifted the stay on Pike's execution only an hour before the 50-year-old was strapped to a gurney in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution’s death chamber. The execution was scheduled to happen at 5:30 pm PT. At 6:53 pm, the reporters were asked to leave. They said that at this moment, Pike was still breathing.
"They did two separate rounds of pentobarbital – which I’ve never seen before – the protocol does say that they should do a second round if the person is still alive,” Sweeney said, adding that she "hadn't seen anything like it" in all the executions she covered last year and this year.
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What Tennessee’s execution rules state
According to Tennessee’s execution protocol, if the inmate is still alive after the first injection is administered, a second syringe can be given. However, there is no clarity on what happens if the second one also fails. Pike was taken to the hospital where she was "being provided life-saving measures," her lawyers said.
Her condition as of Thursday morning remains a mystery. According to a doctor retained by Pike’s legal team, she likely now has a brain injury from the lethal cocktail.
Governor Bill Lee said has ordered "a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred". The execution has also been halted for this year.
What was ‘satanist killer’ Christa Pike's crime?
Christa Pike is accused of brutally torturing and murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was consumed by jealousy as she believed Slemmer was interested in her 17-year-old boyfriend. With the help of two accomplices, she lured into a secluded wooded area near the University of Tennessee campus.
There she beat her, cut her with a box cutter and cleaver, and carved a pentagram into her chest. Then she smashed her skull with a large piece of asphalt, and kept a piece of the skull as trophy to show off to her classmates. Pike was arrested within 36 hours.
