Christa Pike is ‘up and walking’ after botched execution — and she remembers: ‘She is angry’
New York Post · RC · trust 62/100
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Pike, 50, is still mentally “foggy” after she survived two lethal injections from the Tennessee Department of Corrections on Sept. 30, but is extraordinarily moving around her hospital room a week later, her lawyer Stephen Ferrell told the BBC .
“What’s been described to me is that physically there’s quite a bit going on, that her arms are very injured and she’s not able to use them very much,” he told the outlet.
“She is up and walking for the first time today, but just around the room, not very far,” Ferrell added.
While Pike’s physical condition has improved, he described her mental state as “good and bad” and said it remains to be determined whether she suffered any permanent brain damage.
“Good that she is fairly with it, but she’s also somewhat foggy. She can lose her train of thought really easily and forgets where she’s going,” Ferrell said.
Pike was due to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years — but instead became the first prisoner ever to survive a lethal injection in the US.
The convicted murderer was initially described as unconscious and in critical condition when rushed from the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville to the hospital last Wednesday.
But on Tuesday, she shocked the country and woke up.
“She is angry and confused about everything right now. She is very aware that the state tried to execute her,” her attorney Randall Spivey told reporters after a court hearing on Wednesday, where a judge ordered Tennessee officials to preserve syringes and other evidence.
Pike was administered two doses of pentobarbital using at least 7 needles, one of which came out of her arm bent at a 90-degree angle, her legal team claimed.
The convicted killer remains in critical care.
“Despite the severe damage she endured to her arms, she is still handcuffed and shackled to the bed. Her recovery is medically unprecedented. Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery.”
Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist who has advised Pike’s lawyers, earlier told the BBC that Pike is able to communicate in a “basic way” since she woke up and mistakenly thought it was still September.
Pike was sentenced to death for brutally torturing and killing her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer with her boyfriend in a jealous rage in Jan. 1995, when she was 18.
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