If you haven't heard the news, Christa Pike, the Tennessee inmate who was set to receive the death penalty last week but somehow survived two rounds of (allegedly) lethal injections of pentobarbital, is awake. This news broke on Tuesday, and I debated writing about it since I've been following the story pretty closely, but I decided not to. Today, however, we know more, so I figured I'd go ahead and update y'all.
Last we heard, the 50-year-old murderer was "critically ill — unconscious, intubated, and on a ventilator in a Nashville-area hospital after the medical staff attempted to save her life after the botched execution."
On Tuesday, her attorneys said that she was awake, and her prognosis remains unclear, but they expect her to recover.
They also said they believed she was brain dead and there were plans to take her off life support on Tuesday when "to the surprise of everyone," she woke up and started talking.
So, what did she say? "Where am I, and who are you?" were apparently her first words.
One of her attorneys, Randy Spivey from the Tennessee Office of the Post Conviction Defender, said there is still a lot of "cognitive confusion." She also apparently has pneumonia, a blood clot in one of her arms, and her hands and arms are "tremendously swollen."
"I think she is angry and confused about everything right now," he said, adding, "We do not know what, if any, function she will regain in her arms. But we do know that there's a long road ahead, and that is just the physical toll that all of this has taken. Neither we nor Christa have even begun to process what this means for her mental health."
Oh, she's angry?
This is one reason I didn't do the update yesterday. I told my friend and colleague Chris Queen that it's kind of irritating. I'm currently fighting tooth and nail to get my dad proper medical care because of an error with his Medicare, and this woman's getting the best of the best, and we're talking about her like she's some innocent victim, when the reality is that what she is going through pales in comparison to why she's in this situation in the first place.
Here's what I wrote about her crime(s) last week in case you need a reminder:
In 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike thought that her Jobs Corp classmate, Colleen Slemmer, was trying to steal her boyfriend. So Pike and a couple of friends lured Slemmer to an abandoned plant near the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. For half an hour, they taunted and tortured her, and finally, Pike smashed her skull with a piece of asphalt, killing her.
The three returned to their dorm as if nothing had happened, and Pike even kept a souvenir — a piece of Slemmer's skull — that she apparently liked to show off to her other classmates. Less than two days later, she was arrested and confessed to everything, but said she hadn't meant to kill Slemmer, only scare her.
In 1996, at the age of 20, Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. She was sentenced to death for the murder charge and 25 years for the conspiracy charge. In 2001, Pike attempted to kill a fellow inmate by strangling her with a shoestring. In 2004, she was convicted of attempted first-degree murder.
I'm sorry, but this is not someone who I will feel sorry for. I don't care about her recovery. I don't care about her mental health. Perhaps that's not very Christian-like of me, but I feel worse for the taxpayers in Tennessee and the family of Colleen Slemmer who are having to put up with this clown show.