911 calls reveal 30-minute delay in treating Christa Pike after failed execution

There was a 30-minute delay in treating convicted murderer Christa Pike after her failed execution late last month, according to emergency 911 calls between first responders and Tennessee prison officials.Pike, 50, received two doses of a lethal injection on Sept. 30, but she unexpectedly survived both injections. The reason remains unclear. Confusion appears to be a recurring theme surrounding Pike’s botched execution, and that is evident in the events that unfolded thereafter.The 911 call recordings, as reported by the Associated Press, showed that first responders and prison officials did not know whether a request for emergency help from within the execution chamber was legitimate. The first 911 call was at 8:40 p.m., over an hour after the attempted lethal injection started to be administered. The person said they tried to execute Pike, but she was still alive. The dispatcher then asked for a code to verify that the call was a legitimate request, but the caller didn’t give one.“Per supervisors here at the [Department of Emergency Communications], we have been informed it is a false call,” a dispatcher said at 9:03 p.m. “There is no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison.”Four minutes later, a responder said, “Somebody is outside the gate at the prison telling us that it’s real and demanding us to go in. They say they are some sort of state official. I need somebody to get out to the gate and talk to those people.”The responders were contacting the prison officials, who said at 9:07 p.m. that they “would have been the ones to call in and they did not make that call.”By 9:11 p.m., emergency responders were cleared to enter the facility after prison officials confirmed the call’s legitimacy.After a half hour of miscommunication, Pike was promptly hospitalized and placed on a ventilator. She suffered severe arm injuries, burns, blisters, and a blood clot because the drugs apparently pooled into her tissue and did not enter her bloodstream. The Tennessee Department of Correction has not confirmed how the execution failed.Pike’s lawyers said she was discharged from the hospital on Saturday and sent back to the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, where she has been incarcerated for 30 years for a 1995 murder in which Pike and her boyfriend, both of whom were teenagers at the time, tortured and killed their classmate in a case that became widely known for the murder’s brutality.CHRISTA PIKE OUT OF HOSPITAL AND RECOVERING IN PRISON AFTER BOTCHED TENNESSEE EXECUTIONPike slashed 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer with a box cutter and meat cleaver, carved a satanic pentagram symbol into her chest, smashed her head with a rock, and took a fragment of her skull as a souvenir. Pike committed the crime over an intense romantic jealousy of Slemmer, who allegedly attempted to steal her boyfriend’s attention.It is unclear whether Tennessee officials will move forward with a follow-up execution. Pike’s attorneys are asking Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) to commute her death sentence. Days before the execution attempt, Lee rejected the clemency request.