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The mother of the teenager murdered by Christa Pike said she believes she is owed an apology following this week’s botched execution in Tennessee.
Wednesday’s execution attempt came 30 years after Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Pike, 50, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, is in critical condition at a hospital and receiving “life-saving” care after her execution failed despite multiple lethal injections, her attorneys said Thursday.
May Martinez, left, mother of murder victim Colleen Slemmer, walks out of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution during a stay of the planned execution of Christa Pike, Sept. 30, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn.
George Walker IV/AP
Slemmer’s mother had traveled from her home in Orange Park, Florida, to Nashville with her husband for the execution, which got underway Wednesday night after a series of last-minute legal challenges.
“It’s hard. I broke down in tears,” the victim’s mother, May Martinez, told ABC Jacksonville affiliate WJXX over the phone on Thursday while traveling back home to Florida. “She was laying on the table, talking, still laughing, picking up her head.”
Asked if anyone has apologized to her about this, she told the station, “No, sir. Nobody apologized.”
This undated photo provided by May Martinez shows her daughter, Colleen Slemmer, who was murdered in 1995 in Tennessee.
May Martinez via AP
“I think that the state owes me a big apology,” Martinez said.
“And as a mother, I failed her,” she said.
Witnesses to the execution said late Wednesday that authorities appeared to administer two rounds of lethal pentobarbital, but that Pike appeared to still be breathing an hour later when witnesses were escorted out of the chamber.
Multiple witnesses said they could hear Pike breathing and snoring very loudly after the drugs were administered, even after the curtains were closed on the execution chamber.
Martinez told WJXX she asked what would happen next and if Pike would go back to prison.
“‘I don’t know what we’re doing with her yet.’ That’s the answer I got,” she told the station.
“I said, ‘Here we are, 31 years, and you’re laughing in my face again,'” Martinez said. “And that’s what I feel like they did.”
After Martinez publicly sought help with the cost of traveling to Nashville for the execution, the Jacksonville community helped raise more than $2,500, WJXX reported.
“All I wanted was justice,” Martinez told WJXX.
A picture taken on Dec. 4, 2007, shows death row inmate Christa Pike entering a Knox County Criminal Court in Knoxville, Tennessee, obtained by Reuters on Sept. 30, 2026.
J. Miles Cary/Knoxville News Sentinel via USA Today Network via Reuters
Randy Spivey, an attorney with the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender, told reporters on Thursday that Pike was in critical condition and receiving “life-saving medical care.”
Pike’s legal team has called on Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute her death sentence.
Following the botched execution, Lee said he has ordered a “third-party review” and that the state will not carry out any scheduled executions this year.
“So far as we know, the Department of Correction followed exactly the protocol as outlined,” the governor told reporters on Thursday. He said the state needs to know “why the outcome is different this time than ever before.”
“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen. It shouldn’t have happened,” Lee said.
“The people of our state deserve to have those questions answered, and that’s what this investigation is for,” Lee said.
When asked what his message is to the families of Pike and Slemmer, Lee said, “This is a tragedy.”
“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” he said. “It shouldn’t have happened. It’s the most difficult of circumstances as it relates to a sentence that should have been carried out by the state. It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better than that, and we’re going to make sure that happens.”
Asked if he had spoken to Slemmer’s family, the governor said he had not.
In 1996, Pike was found guilty of first-degree murder for beating, torturing and killing Slemmer, a fellow Jobs Corps worker, in a remote area of the University of Tennessee Agricultural campus.
Pike, who was 18 when she committed the crime, had told a friend she planned to kill Slemmer because she “just felt mean that day” and admitted to committing the crime with her then-17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, according to court filings. Shipp was also convicted of first-degree murder for his role in the killing and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
