'I am deeply hurt by the incompetence', Christa Pike speaks on failed execution
Loading article...
Convicted killer Christa Pike says she remains in constant pain, struggles to speak and has been largely isolated in a prison hospital after surviving her execution by lethal injection in Tennessee last month.
In her first public comments since the incident, Pike said she is “deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position”.
“I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured,” she said.
Pike, now 50 years-old, and her boyfriend at the time tortured and stabbed a 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, to death in 1995.
She was 18 at the time, making her one of the youngest women sentenced to death.
Slemmer’s mother travelled from Florida to witness Pike’s execution.
Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital that her lawyers say probably didn’t enter her bloodstream correctly and instead pooled in her arms, leaving them burned and blistered.
“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,” said the convicted killer.
“And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
Pike said she had been prepared to die in peace, but instead woke up alone and confused in a hospital bed.
She said she is now “searching for meaning in what happened to me.”
“I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next,” Pike said in a statement dictated to her legal team from prison.
Pike remains sentenced to die and her attorneys want Republican Governor Bill Lee to change that to life in prison.
However, Lee told reporters this week “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts.”
Follow The Gleaner on X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram @JamaicaGleaner and on Facebook @GleanerJamaica. Send us a message on WhatsApp at 1-876-499-0169 or email us at onlinefeedback@gleanerjm.com or editors@gleanerjm.com.