Dr. Joel Zivot says Christa Pike’s blood disorder likely blocked the lethal drug from reaching her system.
Pike, 50, remains in critical condition at a Nashville, Tennessee hospital after two doses of pentobarbital failed to kill her during a scheduled execution on September 30. Her attorneys issued a health update on October 2 confirming she is on a ventilator and petitioning for an investigation into the botched procedure.
The anesthesiologist, who had previously examined Pike, shared his theory during the outlet’s YouTube series “In The Know.” He pointed to her thrombocytosis, a blood clotting disorder that her legal team had warned officials about months earlier.
Dr. Zivot explained that the clotting probably began shortly after needles were inserted into Pike’s veins. “Christa Pike does not possess some kind of magical pentobarbital resistance. It’s not because she has some unique physiology that resists the effect of pentobarbital,” he said on the show. “It’s not because she has some unique physiology that resists the effect of pentobarbital.”
The clotting may have caused her targeted veins to explode, he continued, which would have sent the pentobarbital leaking into her arm tissue rather than her bloodstream. Pentobarbital is a sedative that kills when concentrated enough in the bloodstream, but Dr. Zivot noted that “the pentobarbital never made it into her bloodstream in a sufficient quantity that led to her death.”
He added that drug degradation could have also played a role in the failure.
Pike’s lawyers had spent months attempting to stay the execution or change the method of death, citing both her thrombocytosis and her difficult veins. Their October 2 filing, they said, “details the serious complications that occurred during the execution attempt, many of which Christa and her attorneys had warned the State and the courts about months earlier.”
Witnesses to the execution reported that Pike remained alive and began to “snore” after the two injections. She received life-saving measures following the failed procedure.
Pike has been on death row for three decades following her 1995 conviction for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Then 18 years old, Pike and her then-17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp tortured Slemmer for 30 minutes, carved a pentagram into her chest, and killed her by striking her head with asphalt in January 1995. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Pike is the first person known to survive two lethal injection attempts.
Her attorneys’ petition to investigate the execution remains pending as she receives hospital care.