Emergency responders waited nearly half an hour to reach Christa Pike because prison officials and dispatchers could not agree the call was genuine, according to newly released 911 audio.
The first call reached dispatchers at 8:40 p.m. On Sept. 30, but guards at Riverbend Prison did not confirm the emergency was real until 9:11 p.m., the recordings show. Pike, 50, had already survived two doses of pentobarbital by then.
At 9:03 p.m., an unidentified caller declared the whole thing off. “Per supervisors here at the DEC [Department of Emergency Communications], we have been informed it is a false call,” the person said. “There is no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison.”
Four minutes later, the tone shifted sharply. “Somebody is outside the gate at the prison telling us that it’s real and demanding us to go in,” a responder reported on the audio. “They say they are some sort of state official. I need somebody to get out to the gate and talk to those people.”
Pike had been strapped to a gurney for roughly an hour while medical staff stuck her with at least seven needles, her attorney Randy Spivey said. One needle bent as it was pulled from her arm. She was unconscious and on a ventilator when she finally reached the hospital, and her lawyers initially feared she was brain dead.
She regained consciousness last week. “Where am I and who are you?” were her first words, according to her legal team. She was walking by the next day.
Her lawyers outlined a grim inventory of injuries earlier this week. Pike suffered a blood clot in one arm, pneumonia, and what they called “extraordinary” swelling. She also faced “cognitive challenges” and “profound psychological trauma,” they said, adding that “significant questions remain about the long-term effects of what she endured.”
Ten days after the botched procedure, Pike was discharged from the hospital and returned to prison. She had been scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries. Instead, she became the first person in the United States known to have survived a lethal injection.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has offered no public explanation for what went wrong inside the execution chamber.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of her 19-year-old Job Corps classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage. Then 18, Pike lured Slemmer to an isolated spot on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus with help from her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and 18-year-old friend Shadolla Peterson. Pike beat Slemmer to death and kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir.
Tennessee has not announced a new execution date for Pike.