Mother of Christa Pike’s victim says she wanted to finish killer off herself after botched execution

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The mother of the woman murdered by death row inmate Christa Pike has spoken of her frustration at the killer’s botched execution and admitted: “I want to go kill Christa. How’s that?”

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer but the attempt to end her life at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, dramatically failed earlier this week.

When the prisoner survived two doses of pentobarbital she was raced to hospital to receive “life-saving measures”.

May Martinez – who was in the witness room with her husband, Raul Martinez Jr, expecting to see justice served on her daughter’s behalf 31 years on – has since told People: “If I could have gotten in that room, I would have taken the box cutter and cut her up like she did Colleen.”

With Pike still receiving medical care and in a critical condition, according to her lawyers, it is unclear what will happen next. Assuming she survives, the state could attempt to execute her for a second time at a later date.

The Martinezes have since returned to Florida to await developments and told the outlet what they had seen as they observed Pike, strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber, react to the twin lethal injections she was given.

“She just lay there,” the stepfather recalled. “She moved her toes a lot.”

“Picked her head up,” May Martinez added.

They said it became clear that something was amiss when the executioners drew the curtains to shield Pike from view around 15 minutes after the first dose was supplied.

“We waited about three minutes and they said, ‘We’re going to give her another dose,’” Raul Martinez. “They opened another bag and she was still picking up her head and moving around.”

However, even with the curtain closed, he said the witnesses could “hear the sounds of her snoring or gurgling” via a microphone in the room. They were subsequently asked to leave.

Their account tallies with the comments of media witnesses present, who gave a press conference outside the facility Wednesday night and reported Pike complaining of a feeling in her forearm as though it were about to explode and asking whether it was normal.

May Martinez had previously expressed a determination to see the death penalty administered to Pike and had told the Associated Press the killer had denied her daughter, who was just 19 when she was murdered, the chance to grow up.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she said.

Martinez told the AP her daughter had volunteered with the Special Olympics, loved roller skating and wanted to pursue a career in computers.

“She was easygoing,” Martinez recalled. “She was a computer geek to begin with. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly. She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.”

She said her daughter called her on the night of the murder, but the call was dropping because of bad reception.

When she called back, her daughter had already gone out for what proved to be her fatal rendezvous with Pike and her boyfriend and accomplice Tadaryl Shipp in some nearby woodland.

“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen,” she concluded. “Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51.”