Mom of Christa Pike’s victim has furious response to watching failed execution: ‘They f–ked up’
The mom of the girl Christina Pike tortured to death slammed Tennessee officials after she watched the botched lethal injection attempt — which ended with officials shuffling her out of the observation room.
Pike, 50, who kidnapped and mutilated 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in a Satanic killing in 1995 near the University of Tennessee, remained alive a day after Wednesday night’s failed execution was called off following two rounds of injection.
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Slemmer’s mother, meanwhile, is furious that Pike isn’t in the morgue.
“They f–ked up,” May Martinez, said in a message to Tennessee’s governor and attorney general, speaking to NBC News.
Slemmer’s stepfather, Raul Martinez, also slammed officials for failing to carry out the execution, and said his stepdaughter’s soul “cannot rest” until her killer is dead.
“This bitch will haunt Colleen’s heavenly journey until she’s been wiped off the face of the earth,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
The bitter comments came more than 30 years after Pike — who was 18 at the time — became convinced Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend.
She and a crony lured Slemmer to an abandoned steam mill and tortured her for an hour while a third girl stood watch.
Pike stripped Slemmer half naked, sliced her with a box cutter and butcher knife hundreds of times as she begged for her life.
When she got bored, Pike carved pentagrams into Slemmer’s forehead and chest.
Eventually Pike picked up a chunk of asphalt and bashed Slemmer’s head over and over — then kept a sliver of the girl’s skull as a souvenir.
Pike would go on to become a cause célèbre for death-penalty opponents, who mounted a high-profile clemency campaign focusing on her troubled youth and the fact that she was just 18 when she murdered Slemmer.
Pike grew up in a broken home, was shuffled between relatives and group homes, and her mother testified that Pike became pregnant as a teenager, was using cocaine and ultimately had an abortion.
She said she was violently sexually assaulted when she was 16; her terror of being pinned down by a man is why she requested an all-woman execution team, her lawyers said.
Pike’s horrific past has become the center of her story for years as she fought her death sentence.
May Martinez wants the story to be about her dead daughter.
“It’s never about the victims. It’s like Colleen was never there,” she told CNN.
When she finally went to the execution chamber viewing room to see justice done, “It was a mess,” she told NBC.
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She recounted hoew she watched Pike kick and jerk under her sheet during the botched procedure, and officials wouldn’t tell them what was happening.
“They didn’t say anything and then, all of a sudden, they asked all the victims to leave. And we left,” May said.
Pike, who was set to be the first woman executed in the Volunteer State in more than 200 years, is now at a hospital under armed guard recieving life-saving care.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) said he was ordering “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred,” in a statement.
The last remaining execution scheduled in the state this year will now not go ahead as planned, he added.