The emergency response for Christa Pike’s botched execution was delayed due to confusion between first responders and Tennessee prison officials, according to 911 dispatch recordings.
Minutes passed as officials and responders tried to decide whether a request for emergency help in the chamber was legitimate. The first call came in at 8:40 p.m., more than half an hour before prison officials confirmed it was indeed a medical crisis.
“Per supervisors here .... we have been informed it is a false call,” one unidentified person says at 9:03 p.m. “There is no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison.”
Four minutes later, a responder said, “Somebody is outside the gate at the prison telling us that it’s real and demanding us to go in. They say they are some sort of state official. I need somebody to get out to the gate and talk to those people.”
It wasn’t until 9:11 p.m. that prison officials affirmed the call for help was legitimate, the calls show.
Pike survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection and has been moved back to prison after being discharged from the hospital, her attorneys have said.
The 50-year-old was discharged from the hospital and is back at the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, the women’s prison where she was housed for 30 years, her attorneys said in a statement.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances. She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery,” her attorneys said on Saturday.
Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital as the state attempted to execute her by lethal injection on 30 September for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer.
She had been in a hospital since the failed execution. The Death Penalty Information Center says Pike is the first person to survive after receiving lethal injection drugs during an execution.
Last week, medical experts told The Independent that Pike had no memory of the execution itself.
“I understand that she is talking and now knows where she is. She has no memory of the execution itself. It’s unclear to me whether she possesses a full cognitive recovery. It’s too soon to really say,” said Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor of anaesthesiology and surgery at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, who has been retained by Pike’s legal team/
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