Newly released 911 dispatch recordings show that emergency responders lost nearly 30 minutes responding to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on the night of September 30 after Tennessee’s attempted execution of Christa Pike failed, largely due to confusion over whether the emergency call was legitimate.
The first call came in at 8:40 p.m., roughly an hour after the lethal injection procedure began. However, the caller could not provide a verification code, leading dispatchers to initially classify the request as false. By 9:03 p.m., a dispatcher announced that supervisors had determined no medical assistance was needed at the facility.
Prison Central Control compounded the problem by telling responders they had not placed the call and would have been the ones to do so. Meanwhile, a first responder reported over radio that an unidentified person outside the prison gates was insisting the emergency was real and demanding entry.
It was not until approximately 9:11 p.m. that Central Control confirmed the situation was genuine and cleared responders to enter. An ambulance and fire trucks reached the building inside the prison campus at 9:14 p.m. One of Pike’s attorneys, Kelly Gleason, also placed a separate 911 call at 9:08 p.m. urging dispatchers that her client had survived the execution protocol and needed immediate medical care.
Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital administered during the execution attempt. She was convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of classmate Colleen Slemmer and was one of the youngest women in U.S. history to receive a death sentence at age 18.
Tennessee’s execution protocol addresses what to do if a first dose fails but provides no guidance for a scenario in which an inmate survives both injections. Medical experts have suggested possible explanations including drug quality problems or IV line placement issues that caused the drug to pool in tissue rather than enter the bloodstream. Pike’s legal team had previously warned prison officials and courts that she had a blood clotting disorder that could affect injection sites.
After being transported to a hospital, Pike spent several days on a ventilator. Her attorneys at one point feared she would not survive. She regained consciousness last week and has since been discharged from the hospital and returned to the women’s prison where she had been held for three decades.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has paused further executions pending a full review of what went wrong. The Tennessee Department of Correction has not publicly explained the execution failure and did not immediately respond to requests for comment.