'She Is Very Aware': Christa Pike's Attorney Reveals Her First Words After Waking Up in Hospital
Days after doctors said convicted murderer Christa Pike was brain dead, she is walking and talking.
Pike was supposed to be executed on Sept. 30 for a grisly 1995 murder, but a botched execution left her alive despite two doses of pentobarbital that were supposed to kill her.
On Wednesday, one of her lawyers said Pike’s team was informed Monday that Pike appeared brain dead and would be taken off life support Tuesday.
“But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team, and including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking,” attorney Randy Spivey said, according to the Independent.
The Christa Pike botched execution has many asking: Can a state try to execute a condemned prisoner again if it fails?
Moral issues aside, the answer is YES, via SCOTUS precedent.
Willie Francis in 1946 survived a faulty La. electric chair that didn’t reach lethal voltage. https://t.co/CjkI5NSCNV
— Corey Clayton (@CoreyClayton) October 8, 2026
“Our understanding was the first thing she said was, ‘Where am I and who are you?’” he said.
“There is still a lot of cognitive confusion… She is very aware that the state tried to execute… She is very aware up to a point,” the attorney said, according to WSMV-TV.
He said she is “angry and confused,” according to the Independent.
Pike “was at peace” before the execution “and then she woke up in a hospital, surrounded by people she didn’t know with a tube down her throat.”
Pike has “a long road to recovery.”
“She has a blood clot in one of her arms. She has pneumonia. She is not able to swallow yet, so she is not eaten. She cannot move either of her arms. Both of her arms and hands are tremendously swollen, and we do not know what, if any, function she will regain in her arms,” he said.
Lawyer Stephen Ferrell said that although Pike was “foggy,” he was told she was able to walk, according to the BBC.
“What’s been described to me is that physically there’s quite a bit going on, that her arms are very injured and she’s not able to use them very much,” he said.
“She is up and walking for the first time today, but just around the room, not very far,” he said.
He described her mental state as “kind of good and bad.”
“Good that she is fairly with it, but she’s also somewhat foggy. She can lose her train of thought really easily and forgets where she’s going.”
Ferrell said it was uncertain how far Pike’s recovery would progress.
Carrie Ross, a sister of Pike’s late mother, Carissa, said doctors contacted the family Monday night.
“They were taking her off the ventilator,” Ross said, according to the Daily Mail. “They were going to let her go — let her die — at 1 o’clock.”
Ross invoked God to explain why Pike is alive.
“When God puts his hand on someone, God is in control. Not the Department of Correction, not us, but God,” she said.
Ross said Pike should be allowed to live out her days in prison.
Executing her “would be horrible.”
“Torture. Don’t do that to a human. She has completed her execution. She went willingly,” she said.
“None of us excuse what she did. We know she committed a horrible, heinous crime, and she has to pay the price for that,” she said.
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