Make New York Post a Preferred Source Christa Pike’s aunt believes her niece became the first ever prisoner to survive lethal injection in the US by an act of God, she revealed in the family’s first interview since the killer woke up in the hospital.
Carrie Ross, who helped raise Pike, 50, and “loves her as a daughter,” said her niece’s life should be spared because the Almighty clearly doesn’t support her execution.
“When God puts his hand on someone, God is in control,” Ross told the Daily Mail. “Not the Department of Correction, not us, but God.”
Christa Pike is still alive after a botch execution in Tennessee. Pike is seen in court here in January 2001. USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect The aunt said she and other relatives haven’t been able to speak to Pike since she woke up from a coma Tuesday.
The Tennessee death row inmate was taken to the hospital in critical condition after surviving a botched execution on Sept. 30.
Pike was given two lethal injections by state corrections officials, but lived. NY Post Pike is unable to eat, and has pneumonia and a blood clot in her arms, according to her lawyers, after receiving two doses of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
“’It’s been up, down, up, down. I have cried more tears in the last week than I’ve cried in my whole life,” Ross said.
Pike was sentenced to death for brutally torturing and killing her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in a jealous rage in Jan. 1995, when she was 18.
But Ross wants her niece’s death sentence to be commuted after the failed attempt, arguing a second attempt would be “torture” and that she’s suffered enough.
“That would be horrible. Torture. Don’t do that to a human,” Ross said. “She has completed her execution. She went willingly.”
