Emergency dispatchers in Tennessee treated the 911 call that followed Christa Pike’s botched execution as a prank, delaying medical help for the condemned murderer by roughly half an hour, according to dispatch audio obtained by the Associated Press and reported by the News & Observer.
The recordings, from the night of September 30, capture a dispatcher telling other units that supervisors at the Department of Emergency Communications had declared the request illegitimate, the AP reported.
“Per supervisors here at the DEC we have been informed it is a false call,” a dispatcher said at 9:03 p.m., according to the wire service, referring to the Department of Emergency Communications. “There is no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison.”
By that point, the first call for help had already been sitting with dispatchers for more than twenty minutes.
Twenty Minutes of Verification, Thirty Minutes Outside the Gate
The initial 911 call came in at 8:40 p.m., the News & Observer reported. Dispatchers spent roughly twenty minutes trying to confirm whether the request was genuine before first responders could be cleared to move.
Even once they were en route, EMS crews found themselves stuck at the prison’s front gate because staff on the scene had not received an entry code, according to the dispatch audio.
“There’s someone at the front gate telling them that this is real and they need to enter, but they can’t enter without police because we never got codes,” a dispatcher said in a separate call, per the AP.
Prison officials eventually confirmed the call was legitimate about thirty minutes after it was placed, and first responders were finally allowed through the gates.
Pike Survived Two Doses of Pentobarbital
Pike, 50, was scheduled to die by lethal injection, but survived two doses of pentobarbital, the drug Tennessee uses in executions that typically causes death within fifteen to thirty minutes. She was taken to a hospital and treated, then discharged and returned to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville.
Her attorneys said in a statement that Pike was grateful to the emergency personnel and medical staff who cared for her under what they described as extraordinary circumstances, and that she continues to receive medical treatment behind bars while they monitor her recovery.
The 1995 murder that landed Pike on death row involved the killing of a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps Center, Colleen Slemmer. Prosecutors said Pike suspected Slemmer of having romantic interest in her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. Pike, Shipp, and a friend, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer to a secluded area, where she was tortured for more than thirty minutes and beaten to death with a piece of asphalt.
A Stay, Then a Failed Execution, Then a Statewide Pause
Pike’s execution had been stopped about an hour before it was originally set to begin after a divided panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay to examine claims that the jury that sentenced her never heard evidence about abuse she suffered as a child.
Her attorneys presented evidence that Pike was sexually assaulted beginning when she was two years old. They also said she was raped at eleven by a neighbor and later by her mother’s live-in boyfriend.
The stay was lifted, and the execution went forward. After the injections failed to kill Pike, Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee paused all executions in the state through the end of the year and ordered an investigation into what went wrong.
The dispatch audio adds a new layer to that review, showing that the breakdown on the night of September 30 extended beyond the death chamber and into the emergency response itself. The lag between the 8:40 p.m. call and the moment first responders were finally waved through the prison gate is now likely to figure into the state’s inquiry into how Pike’s execution was carried out and how authorities handled the aftermath.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/911-audio-reveals-dispatcher-thought-christa-pikes-botched-execution-was-prank-call