Christa Pike is still alive but critically ill, days after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her. Online, people are asking whether she has suffered irreversible brain damage.
Is Christa Pike dead? That’s the question filling X right now, days after Tennessee tried and failed to execute her.
Pike is 50 and was convicted over the 1995 murder of 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer, a killing that involved two others.
Right now Pike’s unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator at a hospital near Nashville. Doctors are working hard to clear the pentobarbital from her system.
Speculation about her condition keeps growing, and a lot of people online are convinced she’s suffered irreversible neurological damage.
“Is Christa Pike dead?” one X user asked.
Another wrote, “If Christa Pike requires ventilation to keep her alive, that leads me to think she is probably brain dead.”
A third wanted to know who gets the final say: “If she’s brain dead who’s in charge? Can the family keep her on life support? Or can the state say, death is death & pull the plug?”
Alive, but in bad shape
Court filings and Pike’s legal team say she’s heavily sedated and unresponsive.
Her arms are in bad shape: swollen, blistered and burned after prison staff made repeated failed attempts to get an IV line in. They used at least seven needles, and one came out bent at a 90-degree angle.
According to her lawyers, she “could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly” while both doses of pentobarbital were given.
Dr. Joel Zivot is an anesthesiologist advising Pike’s legal team. He says two doses of pentobarbital should have been fatal if the drug had circulated normally.
He believes a vein ruptured, and points to the blisters on her arm as the sign. The drug likely pooled in the tissue under her skin instead of reaching her bloodstream. Her existing blood-clotting condition, thrombocytosis, may have made it worse.
Governor Bill Lee has suspended every remaining execution in Tennessee this year and ordered an independent review.
Pike’s attorneys have filed emergency motions to preserve all physical and electronic evidence from the attempt. They’re also asking for her death sentence to be officially commuted.
Read more:
