Christa Pike Survived Her Execution. Colleen Slemmer's Mother Is Still Waiting for Answers.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — May Martinez made the trip to Tennessee for an ending. Her daughter, Colleen Slemmer, was murdered in 1995 by a fellow Job Corps student, Christa Pike, and after three decades of appeals, Tennessee set Pike's execution for September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Martinez and her husband came to witness it. What they witnessed instead was an execution that did not work — and a state that, two weeks later, still cannot tell them why.

"I think the state owes me a big apology," Martinez told WTLV-TV after the failed execution, in an interview reported this week. "All I wanted was justice." She is considering her legal options as she presses for answers about what happened inside the death chamber.

Two doses, and a 911 call

Pike, 50, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, was convicted of torturing and killing Slemmer in 1995, when Pike was 18. Her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, was spared the death penalty because he was not yet an adult when the crime was committed, and he remains in prison. Pike's own appeals stretched across 31 years before the state moved to carry out the sentence on September 30.

According to audio of emergency calls obtained by the Associated Press, prison staff called for an ambulance at about 8:40 p.m. Central time that night and reported that 10 grams of pentobarbital had been administered and the prisoner was not deceased, roughly an hour into the process. The released recordings show confusion on both ends of the line: dispatchers worked through verification procedures the prison caller could not complete, and staff at the Metro Nashville Emergency Communications Center placed their own calls to state corrections officials to confirm that a failed execution had in fact occurred while responders stood by.

In the witness room, Martinez watched the curtains close. She has described seeing Pike talking and lifting her head after the injections, and breaking down in tears. She says she and her husband were kept waiting at the prison for hours afterward, were not permitted to leave without an escort, and were told only that Pike was being taken to an off-site medical facility. Asked whether Pike would return to prison, she says she was told officials did not yet know what they were doing with her.

The recordings also capture how unprepared the machinery around the chamber was for failure. When the Riverbend caller asked for an ambulance and explained the situation, the dispatcher asked for a verification code the caller did not have — prompting an audible "How do they not have a code?" on the dispatch side. Around 9 p.m., a communications-center employee called the Tennessee Department of Correction's central control herself to verify the failed execution, explaining that responders were standing by. In other words, for a stretch of that night, the people responsible for emergency response in Nashville were learning what had happened at the prison at roughly the same speed as the witnesses filing out of it.

Conscious, hospitalized — and discharged

Pike survived. Her attorney, Randy Spivey, has said she remained conscious and was speaking at the hospital, while suffering severe swelling and a total loss of mobility in both arms, and that she faces a long road to recovery. She has since been discharged from the hospital and returned to prison, though her legal team has not detailed what treatment, if any, she is now receiving. Her lawyers have offered one explanation for the failure: that the pentobarbital may have spread under the skin rather than reaching her bloodstream in sufficient quantity. The Tennessee Department of Correction has not stated what it believes went wrong; the BBC is among the outlets that have asked the department for comment.

The case now sits in territory with no map. Pike is believed to be the only person to have survived an attempted execution by lethal injection in the modern era. It has not been decided whether Tennessee will attempt to execute her again. Martinez, in comments reported by NBC News and the Associated Press, has said she did not believe the state would make another attempt — a prospect that leaves the legal fight she has waited 31 years to finish suspended in midair, while the state reviews what happened and the failure has already produced leadership fallout.

The argument over who this story is about

The botched execution has also become a national argument about sympathy and where it belongs. On ABC's The View on October 9, co-host Ana Navarro objected to coverage framing Pike as a victim of the failed procedure, saying the focus belonged on Slemmer and on a family that had already waited more than three decades. It is a tension Martinez herself has voiced more quietly: she told interviewers she expected, on some level, that the state might fail — and that the failure itself has become another injury.

For now, the facts are stark and unfinished. A condemned prisoner received two doses of a lethal drug and lived. A mother who traveled to watch the sentence carried out went home without it. And the state that staged the evening has yet to explain, publicly, how the most controlled procedure it performs went wrong — or what it intends to do next.