In January 1995, Christa Pike and two other students at the Knoxville Job Corps Center lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into the woods. For nearly an hour they beat her, cut her and gagged her. Pike's 17-year-old boyfriend carved pentagrams into Slemmer's chest and face. Pike finished the job by crushing Slemmer's skull with a chunk of broken asphalt.
Then she pried loose a piece of that skull and carried it around to show her friends.
Pike was 18. She's 50 now. On Wednesday, September 30, Tennessee strapped her down and gave her a full dose of pentobarbital.
She kept breathing, so they gave her a second one.
Five minutes later, witnesses said, she was still breathing. Around 9:15 that night an ambulance and a fire truck pulled up to the prison with their lights flashing. Pike is now in a hospital bed, unconscious, with a ventilator doing her breathing. The Death Penalty Information Center says nobody has ever been reported to survive a lethal injection after the drugs went in.
She was supposed to be the first woman Tennessee executed in more than 200 years. Instead, the state has a medical first on its hands.
Three days later, Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada resigned. His statement insisted that "the Department carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol." He also said "stepping aside is in the best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward."
Those two statements can't both stand. If the protocol was followed and a condemned killer survived two doses, the protocol is broken. If the protocol wasn't followed, his department failed at the one job that mattered.
The bigger problem is that Strada had a record of exactly this before Tennessee ever hired him.
From 2020 to 2023, Strada was deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry. He ran prison operations there and was the public face of the state's executions. In 2022, Arizona carried out its first executions in nearly eight years. There were three, and every one went wrong the same way.
On May 11, Clarence Dixon's execution team spent about 40 minutes jabbing his arms looking for a vein. Witnesses said the executioners' hands were shaking. They eventually cut a line into his groin. On June 8, the team couldn't find a usable vein in Frank Atwood's arm and finally went in through his hand. On November 16, the team spent more than 20 minutes failing to get IVs into Murray Hooper's arms before going to the groin again. Hooper turned to the witnesses and asked, "Can you believe this?"
Strada was the man who walked out afterward and announced Hooper's death.
Arizona's next corrections director, Ryan Thornell, looked over the paperwork for those executions. He found documentation that was "severely lacking," execution drugs stored in unlabeled jars, and a team with "inadequate knowledge and expertise." On Strada's communications with the pharmacist, the finding was that he "didn't record anything." A separate review by a retired federal magistrate found that execution staff had looked up lethal injection dosages on Wikipedia.
In January 2023, Tennessee hired him to run its prisons.
He came at a delicate moment. In 2022, Tennessee had called off Oscar Smith's execution at the last minute after it came out that the drugs hadn't been properly tested. Every execution in the state was paused for an outside investigation. Strada was supposed to be part of the fix.
Federal defenders say Tennessee's 2025 execution protocol copied language straight from the 2022 Arizona protocol that Arizona has since worked to correct.
Then came May 21 of this year. Tony Carruthers was condemned for the 1994 murders of Marcellos Anderson, Anderson's mother Delois, and Frederick Tucker. Strada's team got a primary IV line into Carruthers. Then it spent more than an hour trying and failing to get the required backup line, including a central line attempt. The execution was called off, and Carruthers walked away with a one-year reprieve.
Christa Pike is the second failed execution in Tennessee under Strada's watch, and the second one this year.
Witnesses and Pike's attorneys say the team went through at least seven needles over the course of an hour. The same complaint has followed him through every state he's worked in: the people running the execution room can't reliably get a needle into a vein.
Gov. Bill Lee has postponed every remaining 2026 execution in Tennessee. He has hired former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to conduct an independent review. Every family still waiting on one of those executions just got moved further back in line.
Pike had asked for an all-female lethal injection team, and the state agreed. So a woman who tortured another woman to death got to pick who was in the room for her final moments. Colleen Slemmer never got a say in hers.
Former Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith, who investigated the original murder, put it in three words: Pike "represents pure evil." Thirty-one years of appeals, motions and delays came to an end, and the state still couldn't finish the sentence.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is running for governor, had an answer ready. "While there should be a thorough review of what happened and why the process failed, the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly," she wrote. "As your governor, I will do just that."
Lethal injection was sold as the clean, clinical method. In Tennessee it has become the method most likely to end with an ambulance. Supply problems, manufacturer restrictions and constant legal attacks on specific drugs have made it fragile even with a competent team running it. Under Frank Strada, Tennessee didn't have one.
Tony Carruthers is waiting out his reprieve. Christa Pike is breathing on a ventilator. Colleen Slemmer has been dead for 31 years.
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