Emergency responders were delayed after prison officials struggled to verify reports that Christa Pike had survived a failed execution attempt at Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
Pike, 50, had been given two doses of pentobarbital on September 30 over the 1995 killing of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. But she was still breathing, prompting an unusual scramble between prison staff, police dispatchers and medical teams.
Newly released dispatch records show that the first 911 call was made at 8.40pm, about an hour after the lethal injection began.
“We’ve been carrying out an execution tonight. We’ve administered 10 grams of pentobarbital. The person is not yet deceased,” the caller told the dispatcher while requesting an ambulance.
The dispatcher asked for a verification code used by agencies to confirm that such calls were genuine. The caller did not have one, leading the dispatcher to contact Tennessee Department of Correction Central Control at 8.59pm.
“We are trying to find out if that is an actual thing that is happening and we need to send an ambulance,” the dispatcher said, “or if this is someone that is basically prank-calling.”
Officials at Central Control initially said nobody from their office had contacted police about a failed execution. At 9.03pm, the dispatcher recorded that the call had been reported as false and that no medical assistance was needed at the prison.
Twenty-six minutes after the original call, at 9.06pm, the Department of Correction called back with the required code.
But confusion continued at the prison gates. A first responder reported that someone claiming to be a state official was outside and insisting that emergency crews be allowed in.
“Somebody is outside the gate at the prison telling us that it’s real and demanding us to go in,” the responder said. “They say they are some sort of state official. I need somebody to get out to the gate and talk to those people.”
Five minutes later, a police dispatcher contacted the Tennessee Highway Patrol and asked for a trooper to clear a route through the gates.
“We need to send police hot because there is someone at the gate telling them this is real and they need to enter, but they can’t enter without police because we never got the codes,” the dispatcher said. “Can you send a trooper out there?”
The dispatcher also said Pike’s defence attorney, Kelly Cleason, was calling for an update and that the situation was “escalating”. Ambulances and police vehicles arrived outside Riverbend, and records show Pike was taken to hospital at 9.36pm.
She spent several days on a ventilator and, at one stage, her lawyers did not expect her to survive. They later said she regained consciousness, began speaking a little and could walk with assistance.
Pike was discharged from hospital and returned to the women’s prison where she had been held for 30 years, according to her lawyers. They said she remained grateful to the first responders and medical team involved in her care and was continuing to receive treatment in prison.
Investigation into Tennessee execution attempt
The failed execution has prompted renewed scrutiny of death sentences in Tennessee. Governor Bill Lee postponed another execution this year, while the state’s prison chief resigned after Pike’s hospitalisation.
A judge has ordered the state to preserve all evidence connected to the execution attempt. Judge I’Ashea Myles described the case as “unique to say the least” and warned officials not to lose, misplace or delete information relevant to the investigation.
Assistant Attorney General John Ayers said there was no pending execution order for Pike and insisted that the Department of Correction had already preserved the evidence. He said log books, observation records, medical waste and products, and electrocardiogram readouts had been retained.
Mr Ayers said the intravenous lines had been cut and that parts might still have been attached to Pike when she was taken to hospital.
Medical and lethal-injection experts have considered whether a fault with the IV line caused the drug to collect in tissue instead of entering her bloodstream.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat and killed 19-year-old Slemmer at a job training camp. Prosecutors said Pike lured Slemmer into a wooded area, cut her with a box cutter and struck her with a piece of asphalt after fearing she was trying to take her boyfriend.
Shipp, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only person involved to receive a death sentence.
Her lawyers have argued that she has suffered enough and are seeking to have the sentence commuted. It remains unclear how state officials will proceed with her case.
