The mother of murder victim Colleen Slemmer says Tennessee badly mishandled the Christa Pike execution on Wednesday night. Pike survived two rounds of lethal injection at a Nashville prison and was taken to a hospital.
May Martinez traveled from Florida to see the sentence carried out. In a phone interview with NBC News on Thursday morning, she said the execution simply did not work, and that she and other witnesses were kept in the dark while it fell apart.
What happened inside Riverbend
The procedure began at about 8 p.m. local time at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, according to the Associated Press. The curtain over the witness-room window was reportedly closed twice. At one point, media witnesses were asked to leave.
Martinez said the families learned almost nothing in the moment. Only after they were taken to an office did the corrections commissioner tell them the injections had failed and that Pike was being taken to a hospital.
Tennessee’s protocol calls for a second round of injections if the first does not work. It says nothing about what staff should do if the prisoner is still alive after that.
That gap quickly landed in federal court. Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to stop the execution and secure medical care for her. U.S. District Judge Clifton L. Corker granted it, noting that medical personnel had already started treating her.
Questions over the drug and the protocol
Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine retained by Pike’s defense team, offered one explanation. He said Pike may never have reached a pentobarbital level in her blood high enough to stop her breathing or cause cardiovascular failure. He added that the delay before resuscitation began could leave her with brain injury.
The Tennessee Department of Correction rejects any suggestion that staff made errors. A spokesperson told The Tennessean that the department followed every step of the protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office. The spokesperson said the drug has worked reliably in past executions, and that the protocol does not permit anything beyond what staff carried out.
Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent outside review to establish exactly what went wrong. The state’s last execution scheduled for this year will not go ahead as planned.
This is the second Tennessee execution to fail in 2026. In May, staff could not find a usable vein during the scheduled execution of Tony Carruthers. The state had only recently resumed executions: Tennessee carried out an execution in 2025 after a three-year pause to review lethal injection drug testing. Fox News
Why the Christa Pike execution drew national attention
Pike’s case was already historic before Wednesday. She is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, and her execution would have made her the first woman put to death in the state since 1820, and only the fourth in its history. Fox News
The crime dates back more than 30 years. Pike was 18 when she killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995. Pike and her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, were found to have beaten and killed Slemmer after Pike accused her of trying to steal him. Fox News
A jury convicted Pike in 1996 and sentenced her to death. Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A third person involved testified against Pike and was given probation. Fox News
Pike’s lawyers have long fought the sentence. They argued that her youth, a history of abuse, and later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder should rule out execution. Fox News
A mother who has waited three decades
Martinez did not soften her verdict on the state’s performance. NBC asked what she would say to the governor and the attorney general. She answered with a single profane sentence saying they had botched it. She also said Pike showed no remorse during the attempt.
Before the execution, Martinez spoke to the Argentine newspaper ClarÃn about the daughter she lost. She remembered Colleen as a 19-year-old who loved computers, retro video games and the roller rink.
“I am her voice. Someone has to speak for Colleen,” Martinez said.
Pike is now alive in state custody after two doses of a drug meant to kill her. The outcome of the governor’s review will decide what Tennessee does next. Nothing in the state’s current rules says what should happen to a prisoner who survives.
