Tennessee's Failed Execution: What the 911 Calls Reveal
Nashville emergency officials released 911 recordings that show confusion and delay in getting medical help to Christa Pike after Tennessee's lethal injection failed to kill her on 30 September.
The first call from Riverbend Prison came at 20:40 local time, according to records released by the Nashville Department of Emergency Communications and described on 13 October by BBC. The caller said Pike had been given 10 grams of pentobarbital, the drug used to carry out the execution, starting about an hour earlier, and asked for an ambulance. Dispatchers treated the call as possibly false after the caller could not confirm identity with a security code. The code worked like a password check.
That started a 30-minute back-and-forth between prison staff and dispatchers. At 21:07, staff at prison central command said they should have been the ones to call and said they had not made that call. At about 21:11, prison officials confirmed the first call was genuine, and emergency crews were then let through the prison gates. At 21:34, while Pike was being taken to hospital, a medic asked a colleague to make sure the prison knew where she was being taken amid confusion. She was taken to hospital after it became clear she would not die from the dose. The confusion delayed emergency help, AP reported after first obtaining the audio.
Pike, 50, is the only woman now on Tennessee's death row. She was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer with her then-boyfriend. The Tennessee Department of Correction lists her as inmate #261368. The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for the execution to go ahead on 30 September.
She received two doses of lethal injection that night. She is thought to be the only person to survive a lethal injection attempt. Her lawyers said the pentobarbital likely leaked under the skin instead of going fully into the bloodstream in a dose large enough to kill her. Pike stayed critically ill for days afterward. At one point her lawyers believed she was brain dead and that life support would be removed the next day, Reuters reported on 8 October. They demanded to see the syringes and drug residue from the procedure. Pike was later described as "angry and confused." She has since left hospital, though her team warned she faces a "long road to recovery."
Her co-defendant, Tadaryl Shipp, who was Pike's boyfriend at the time of the murder, remains in prison. He was spared the death penalty because he was not yet an adult when the crime happened. Slemmer's mother called the failed execution a "mess." Pike's lawyers are asking Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence, meaning to reduce her punishment. Tennessee has paused all executions since the drugs failed to kill Pike, according to The Tennessean. The Nashville Department of Emergency Communications also released records of its talks with other local agencies as it tried to check whether the Pike call was real.
The broader context here is procedural as much as legal. Lethal injection depends on three things: getting into a vein, the drug working as intended, and clear communication between prison staff and outside medical crews. The recordings point to a failure in that third link. A code system meant to block false calls blocked a real one instead, central command denied a call from its own prison, and verification took more than half an hour while a critically ill prisoner waited.
Looking at what this means for Tennessee, two questions are now being examined at the same time. One is about the method itself, including how syringes were handled, what the drug residue shows, and whether leakage under the skin weakened delivery. The other is about emergency planning, including who can call for help, how that call is checked, and how prisons and hospitals coordinate transport when a court-ordered execution turns into a medical emergency. Both will affect any future decision about whether, and how, the state resumes executions.
