Emergency help was delayed by confusion after failed execution of Christa Pike, 911 calls reveal

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Emergency help for Christa Pike was delayed by confusion among first responders and Tennessee prison officials following her failed execution last month, according to 911 dispatch recordings.

The recordings, obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request, show that precious minutes elapsed as officials and responders tried to figure out whether a request for emergency help in the execution chamber was legitimate.

The first 911 call came in at 8:40 p.m. on Sept. 30, just over an hour after the attempted lethal injection got underway. It wasn’t until half an hour later that prison officials affirmed the call was legitimate and began letting responders through the prison gates.

Pike, 50, was hospitalized after surviving two doses of pentobarbital as the state tried to execute her for the 1995 stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer. She was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed Slemmer, becoming one of the youngest women to be sentenced to death.

Pike was on a ventilator for several days and, at one point, her attorneys did not expect her to survive. She regained consciousness last Tuesday and began talking limitedly and walking with assistance, they said. Pike was discharged from the hospital and returned to the women’s prison where she was housed for 30 years, her lawyers said Saturday.

Confusion began on the initial 911 call, in which a person whose name and title were redacted said they were at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and had tried to execute someone, but she was still alive. The dispatcher asked for a code to verify that the call was legitimate, but the caller didn’t have one.

“Per supervisors here at the DEC (Department of Emergency Communications) we have been informed it is a false call,” a dispatcher says at 9:03 p.m. “There is no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison.”

Four minutes later, a responder reported: “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.”

As emergency responders worked to verify the call, they were in touch with representatives of the prison’s Central Control, who said they “would have been the ones to call in and they did not make that call,” according to a recording time-stamped at 9:07 p.m.

A few minutes later, Central Control confirmed the call was legitimate and cleared the way for responders to enter at 9:11 p.m.

The Tennessee Department of Correction has not said what went wrong in the attempted execution. Medical experts have raised a few possibilities that could explain how Pike was able to survive, including potential drug quality issues and the placement of IV lines causing the drug to pool in her tissue.