Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure. Pike was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. Neither the attorneys nor Tennessee Department of Corrections officials provided an update on Pike’s condition late Wednesday. Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay. Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled.” Seven other people have survived medical problems due to the execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, said in a statement that he was ordering “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” He added that the last remaining execution for this year will not be carried out as planned. Witnesses detail the execution attempt: ‘This did not go like they thought’ Media witnesses observing from a separate room said officials raised curtains to the execution chamber at 7:27 p.m., showing Pike strapped to a gurney. Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. It was not clear what she was referencing. Journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring, gasps and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid over her, according to NBC News. By 8:26 p.m., execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered. Officials closed the curtains and Pike could be heard snoring until the microphone was cut off at 8:53 p.m. At that time there was an announcement to escort media witnesses out of the area. “It appeared that this did not go like they thought it was supposed to go,” said John North, investigative producer at NBC affiliate WBIR-TV in Knoxville. “But we don’t know that. When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive.” In a phone interview with NBC News early Thursday morning, May Martinez, the mother of victim Colleen Slemmer, described the failed execution attempt. “It was a mess,” she said. Martinez also criticized the communication from officials, saying the victims’ families were asked to leave and only later learned that it didn’t work and Pike was on her way to the hospital. “They f—– up,” she said. A spokesperson for the Department of Correction said the state “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office” and that “the lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective.” Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion late Wednesday to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and it was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. They also filed motions in the Sixth Circuit court and district court. The motion also asserted that the Department of Correction should begin lifesaving measures. “Failure to provide such care constitutes deliberate indifference to legitimate, serious medical needs.” Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The case garnered widespread attention in part because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution: In May state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital. Stay of execution was swiftly appealed After the stay was issued, Tennessee’s attorney general immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Witnesses and media remained at the prison while the high court considered the case. The attorney general’s office wrote in the appeal that halting the execution at the last moment traumatized Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s attorneys. Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argue the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler. “It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” her attorneys wrote in a filing. Pike’s case renewed debate on the death penalty for teens As the execution date drew near, Pike’s case renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike’s death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had such sentences vacated. After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t “put the brakes on.” “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement. Victim’s mother says she is waiting for death sentence Slemmer’s mother wants the lethal injection to go forward, saying she has waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez told The Associated Press in a telephone interview on Saturday. Martinez said a group helped raise money so she and her husband could travel from Florida to witness the execution. She didn’t respond to a message Wednesday after the execution was halted. Martinez said her daughter’s age should matter too in deciding Pike’s fate. “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst,” she said, noting that her daughter would have turned 51 earlier in September. The killing rocked the city of Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, has admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satan, into her body. Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death. Executions of women are rare in the U.S. Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Older records can be spotty, though, so it’s difficult to know precise details about the last woman who was put to death there. It’s a rarity across the U.S. Since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the country, representing about 1% of all executions, according to the center. Most recently, Missouri in 2023 executed Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the U.S. In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government put a female inmate to death. Pike would be the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year. Florida carried out its 16th execution of 2026 on Tuesday. Associated Press journalists Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Ed White in Detroit contributed to this report. ...read more read less