Christa Pike, the Tennessee woman whose September 30 execution failed to kill her, has been released from the hospital and returned to prison, her lawyers said.
Pike, 50, is now back at the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the same facility where she has been housed for more than 30 years, according to a statement from her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell, Luke Ihnen, Randy Spivey, and Kelly Gleason, reported by CBS News on Saturday.
“Christa Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center where she has been housed for more than 30 years,” the attorneys said. “She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances. She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Pike was in critical condition after surviving a double dose of pentobarbital during her scheduled execution for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She regained consciousness, was able to speak, and Ferrell said she walked around her hospital room.
“She is angry and confused about everything right now. She is very aware that the state tried to execute her,” Spivey said.
It is not yet clear what will happen to Pike now that she has survived the lethal injection procedure. Ihnen said “the state has made no promises that Ms. Pike will not be subject to a future execution.”
The 1995 killing in Knoxville
Pike was 18 years old when she and two classmates from the Knoxville Job Corps Center, a vocational school for troubled youths, lured Slemmer to a park under the pretense of retrieving marijuana. Over nearly an hour, they beat, cut, and gagged her before crushing her skull with a piece of broken asphalt.
When Slemmer tried to escape, the group held her down. When she begged for her life, they slashed her with blades, and when she cried, they gagged her with a hair tie. Pike kept a fragment of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy and reportedly showed it to classmates before her arrest. Her boyfriend at the time, who was also convicted but spared the death penalty because he was 17, carved pentagrams into her chest and face.
Former Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith, who worked the case, told Fox News the crime still haunts him. “She represents pure evil,” Keith said.
Pike is believed to be the only known inmate in the country to have survived a lethal injection attempt.
