Erica Siaulinski, Staff Writer
The state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection for a murder she committed against a classmate when she was 18 years old. After being administered one dose of lethal injection and seeing no results, a second was administered. She’s the first person recorded to survive lethal injection.
In 1996, Pike was sentenced to death for the murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, alongside Pike’s boyfriend at the time Tadaryl Shipp. Pike believed that Slemmer was secretly interested in her boyfriend. Pike and Shipp devised a plan to murder Slemmer. On January 12, 1995 they lured Slemmer into the woods where they tortured her before taking her life. Classmates claimed that Pike bragged about the murder and even kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull from the murder. It took 36 hours to arrest Pike. In March of 1996 she was put on trial and the court found her guilty. Some argued that her case wasn’t fairly presented, with the full truth of her troubled childhood, mental health issues and trauma that she did face. Regardless, she was sent to death row and remained there for decades, being the first woman to receive the death penalty by the state in over 200 years.
Following Pike’s trial, the Tennessee Department of Corrections adopted a policy requiring death row inmates to be held in maximum security conditions. Pike was treated for obsessive compulsive disorder. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Pike sued the Tennessee Department of Corrections in 2022, claiming that her conditions of confinement were unequal to those of similarly situated male inmates. While male death row inmates were allowed to socialize and work together, Pike was subject to more restrictive conditions. The state settled the lawsuit in September 2024, agreeing to equalize Pike’s treatment with the men also on death row.
On September 30, 2026 Pike was injected with not one, but two doses of lethal injection. When her heart failed to stop completely, she was rushed to a hospital near the Nashville area where it was attempted to flush the large doses of pentobarbital out of her system. She was put on a ventilator, unconscious and both of her arms were swollen and burned due to the lethal injection.
Many have asked how could this happen? Pike’s attorney wrote in an emergency motion “Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” Pike still remains in a Tennessee hospital, and recently has been reported to be on her feet and walking with help from nursing staff as of October 9th, 2026.
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