911 delays hampered response to botched Pike execution, recordings reveal

The 911 call came in at 8:40 p.m. on September 30th from inside Riverbend Prison in Tennessee. A caller told the dispatcher that prison officials had administered lethal injection drugs to an inmate—ten grams of the chemical—roughly an hour earlier, and the person was still alive. An ambulance was needed immediately.

What followed was a half-hour of confusion that kept emergency responders locked outside the prison gates while a woman lay dying inside. The 911 dispatch recordings, released Monday and first obtained by The Associated Press, document how miscommunication between prison officials and first responders created a critical delay in medical care during what would become the most extraordinary execution failure in modern American history.

The dispatcher asked the caller for a verification code. The caller did not have one. This became the first of several obstacles. As the dispatcher tried to confirm whether the call was genuine, communications fanned out across multiple agencies—the Nashville Fire Department, Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, Tennessee Highway Patrol, and the prison's own Central Control. Each agency was trying to verify the same question: Was someone actually dying at Riverbend, or was this a false alarm?

At 9:03 p.m.—twenty-three minutes after the initial call—someone at the Department of Emergency Communications announced to responders that supervisors had determined the call was false. "There is no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison," the voice on the recording said. But four minutes later, a responder reported that someone was at the prison gate insisting the emergency was real and demanding entry. That person claimed to be a state official.

The confusion deepened when prison Central Control told responders they would have been the ones to make such a call, and they had not made it. This denial—coming from the very people who had actually called 911—created a verification trap. Emergency personnel could not enter without confirmation from the prison. The prison was denying it had called. Meanwhile, inside the execution chamber, Christa Pike remained in medical crisis.

At 9:11 p.m., Central Control finally confirmed the call was legitimate and cleared responders to enter. Thirty-one minutes had elapsed since the first 911 call. Pike, fifty years old, was rushed to a hospital. She was placed on a ventilator. Her attorneys did not expect her to survive.

But she did. Pike woke up. She recovered. She is now back at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, the women's prison where she had been housed for the previous thirty years. She is the only known person in the United States to have survived an execution attempt, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Pike had been convicted in the 1995 beating and stabbing death of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. She was the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820—except she was not executed. The state has not explained what went wrong with the lethal injection. Medical experts have suggested the IV line may have failed, causing the drugs to pool in her tissue rather than enter her bloodstream. What happens to Pike now remains unclear.