As prison staff tried repeatedly to find a vein, Christa Pike’s right arm turned purple during the execution attempt.
Four days later, Pike, 50, remains unconscious and dependent on a ventilator after Tennessee halted her execution attempt at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Doctors are still trying to remove the two doses of pentobarbital from her body, her lawyer Stephen Ferrell said on Sunday.
Officials attempted the procedure on Wednesday. They used at least seven needles in an attempt to establish intravenous access, with at least one needle appearing bent, before giving Pike two injections of pentobarbital.
Pike’s lawyers said her veins had blown, sending the drug into body tissue rather than her bloodstream. Her arm turned purple, with blistering and burning around the injection sites, according to her attorney Randy Spivey, who witnessed the procedure.
They said Pike could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly during the attempt. She was taken by ambulance to a Nashville hospital after the execution was stopped.
By Thursday night, she was unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator. Spivey said then: “We don't have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment. But we do know that she is alive right now.”
Ferrell has been unable to see Pike since the attempt.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising Pike’s defence team, said the blisters indicated a ruptured vein. He told the BBC: “It's very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury.”
Zivot said Pike likely never achieved a blood level of pentobarbital sufficient to cause apnoea and cardiovascular failure.
Steven Hale, a Nashville Banner reporter who witnessed the execution, told the BBC: “None of us had seen anything like that. It was definitely a disaster by pretty much any way of looking at it.”
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed Slemmer, who was 19, in 1995.
The three had met at a job training camp for troubled teenagers. Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Pike is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row and had been due to become the first woman executed in the state in over 200 years.
Her legal team challenged Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol in January, saying she had thrombocytosis and small veins that made needle insertion harder. Governor Bill Lee denied her clemency petition, allowing the execution to proceed.
Lee called the failed execution a tragedy on Thursday and ordered a comprehensive third-party review. On Saturday, he announced that Frank Strada, the Tennessee Department of Correction commissioner, was stepping down.
Strada said in a joint statement with Lee that his resignation was in the best interests of the state.
Lee has suspended scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year. Pike’s lawyers are seeking to have her death sentence commuted.
The attempt was Tennessee’s second failed execution in 2026. In May, officials called off the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff could not find a vein.
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