May Martinez, the mother of Christa Pike’s victim, has described the scene inside the execution chamber yesterday as “a mess” after witnessing the Tennessee inmate survive two rounds of lethal injection.
Martinez traveled from Florida to Nashville this week to witness the execution of Pike, who was convicted in 1996 of murdering her daughter, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, in Knoxville in 1995. Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were found to have beaten and killed Slemmer after Pike accused her of trying to steal her boyfriend.
Speaking to NBC News in a phone interview Thursday morning, Martinez said the execution did not go as expected. “They went to try to execute her, and she didn’t die,” she said.
Martinez said she and other witnesses were given little information in the moment. “We didn’t know anything until we got up to the office and saw the commissioner. And he said that it didn’t work, that it didn’t work, and she’s on her way to the hospital,” she said.
Asked what she would say to Tennessee’s governor and attorney general, Martinez replied: “They f***** up.” She added that Pike showed no remorse during the execution attempt.
According to AP, the procedure began at Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution at around 8:00 p.m. local time. The curtain to the witness room was reportedly closed twice during the process, and media witnesses were at one point asked to leave.
Tennessee’s execution protocol calls for a second round of injections if the first fails, but does not specify what happens if the inmate remains alive after that.
Pike’s legal team filed an emergency motion to halt the execution and request medical care, which District Judge Clifton L. Corker granted, noting that medical personnel had begun treatment.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an Emory University School of Medicine professor retained by Pike’s attorneys, said it is possible Pike never reached a high enough blood concentration of pentobarbital to cause fatal apnea or cardiovascular failure, and that the delay before resuscitation began could result in brain injury.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has defended its handling of the execution. A spokesperson told The Tennessean that the department followed every step of the protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office, adding that the lethal injection chemical “has consistently been effective” and that the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out.
Governor Bill Lee has ordered what he called “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” The state’s final scheduled execution of the year will not proceed as planned. It is the second execution to go wrong in Tennessee this year; in May, staff were unable to find a vein during the scheduled execution of Tony Carruthers.
Before the execution, Martinez told the outlet Clarín that she remembers her daughter as a 19-year-old who loved computers, retro video games, and the roller rink.
“I am her voice. Someone has to speak for Colleen,” she said.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
