One month after Tennessee tried and failed to execute her, Christa Pike says she has not had a single pain-free moment since she woke up in a hospital.
Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, was strapped to a gurney at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on September 30. She had made her peace.
“I had told the people who loved me, supported me and stood by me through the years I was grateful for them,” she said in a statement dictated to her legal team and released October 30. “I had also told the people in the room and who were there to witness my execution that I was leaving them in loving kindness.”
She received two full doses of pentobarbital. Witnesses reported hearing her snore until the chamber microphone was cut, and her attorneys said an ambulance took her away alive. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, once the drugs had actually been administered, no prisoner in the modern era had survived.
“Several days later I woke up alone in a hospital confused and in pain,” Pike said. “There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
Pike was 18 when she and two Job Corps classmates killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in January 1995. In her statement she returned to that history.
“I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured,” she said. “I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position.”
She has been largely isolated in the prison’s medical ward since the attempt. “I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger,” she said.
“But healing is not the same as being okay.” She said she spent 28 years in solitary confinement and that “much of what I am experiencing today is a repeat of that condition.”
What has given her strength, she said, is the response from strangers. “I am overwhelmed by the kindness and prayers of people I have known for years and complete strangers who have never met me,” she said. “To know that so many people care about me, that they see me as a human being whose life matters, is something I cannot fully put into words.”
She closed by looking at an uncertain future. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next. Some days, finding hope is harder than others,” she said. “For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time. And I am holding on to the love and kindness of so many people who have reminded me that I am not alone.”
