Christa Pike Survives Failed Execution as Victim’s Mother Asks for an Apology

Tennessee stopped its execution calendar on Thursday after Christa Pike survived a failed lethal injection at Riverbend the day before. Gov. Bill Lee ordered a review and pushed the remaining dates off the year. Pike was still unconscious and on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital as of Thursday night.

The legal fight moved to a bedside. The woman who came to watch did not get an answer on the drive home.

The mother who left without an apology

May Martinez is the mother of Colleen Slemmer, killed in Knoxville in 1995. Pike was convicted in that case and sentenced in 1996. Martinez traveled to Nashville for Wednesday’s date. She told ABC’s Jacksonville station she broke down on the way back to Florida.

“It’s hard. I broke down in tears,” she said. “She was laying on the table, talking, still laughing, picking up her head.”

Asked if anyone had apologized, she said no. “I think that the state owes me a big apology.” Later she added, “Here we are, 31 years, and you’re laughing in my face again.”

If Christa Pike had known this day would come, would she still have committed murder? During her roughly 30 years on death row, she was also convicted of attempting to murder another inmate.

Should surviving an execution attempt allow her to live out her life when her victim… pic.twitter.com/fFFYCyROVe

— Debi Bonardi (@BonardiDebi) October 3, 2026

That is the part the protocol debate keeps skipping. A mother waited three decades, raised travel money from neighbors, and left with a sentence that was neither carried out nor explained.

What the lawyers and the governor said

Pike’s lawyers had warned a court that her veins and medical history made a clean execution unlikely. After Wednesday they said the fear she named, a long and painful death, is what the day became. “Minus the death,” said Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee.

Randy Spivey, another lawyer, called the chamber “torturous.” A Friday filing said she arrived at the hospital critically ill, with both arms swollen and blistered, and that staff were still trying to clear the drugs. Her team also said they struggled to get a phone and a straight answer while the attempt was still going.

Lee, a Republican, halted executions for the rest of the year and asked for an investigation. It is the second pause in Tennessee in five years. Lawyers for Pike say the prison chief on this case had already overseen other troubled executions. The state has not published a finding.

A date that did not close

Pike has been on death row for about 30 years. Had Wednesday ended as planned, she would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee since the early 1800s. It did not end. She is alive, unconscious, and the warrant is in limbo.

According to the Associated Press, Lee postponed her execution and set another for this year. Families on both sides are now waiting on a hospital chart and a review that has not started in public. Martinez is still waiting on the apology she asked for.

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