For thirty-one years, May Martinez waited for one date.

September 30, 2026.

She believed that date would finally close the criminal case that had followed her family since her daughter, Colleen Slemmer, was murdered at nineteen.

May and her husband, Raul Martinez Jr., drove roughly eleven hours from Florida to Tennessee.

They arrived at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution early that morning.

They expected to watch Christa Pike die.

Instead, they watched Tennessee fail to execute her.

Twice.

And four days later, Pike is still alive.

Colleen is still dead.

For the Slemmer family, that is the only comparison that matters.

May Martinez has now described what she saw through the witness-room glass, what happened after the execution failed, and why she believes the public conversation has once again shifted away from her daughter.

Her niece, Morgan Seeley, has spoken publicly as well.

So has Colleen’s stepfather.

Their anger is directed at Pike.

But increasingly, it is also directed at the state of Tennessee.

Because September 30 was supposed to be the night the system delivered the punishment it had promised for more than three decades.

Instead, the family drove home with another unanswered question.

What happens now?

May and Raul arrived at Riverbend at approximately 8:30 that morning.

The original execution was expected around 10 a.m.

But emergency litigation delayed the procedure for hours while federal courts and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court considered Pike’s final legal challenges.

May told People that she and Raul remained at the prison for roughly twelve hours.

She said they received little information while they waited and were not provided food during that long period.

Only in the evening were they finally told the execution would proceed. People.com

For May, the wait carried a history almost impossible to separate from that room.

Her final telephone conversation with Colleen had happened more than thirty years earlier.

May later recalled that the connection was poor.

She ended the call expecting to speak to her daughter again.

By the time she tried to reconnect, Colleen had already been killed. People.com

That memory followed her into Riverbend.

May had brought a photograph of Colleen.

She intended to hold it where Pike might see it.

She wanted the final moments to belong, in some way, to the daughter whose name had spent decades appearing beneath Pike’s in court documents and newspaper headlines.

Then the execution began going wrong.

Pike had already endured repeated attempts to establish intravenous access.

Her lawyers later said officials used numerous needles and that her small veins and thrombocytosis had been known problems before September 30.

Once the pentobarbital began flowing, witnesses said Pike remained responsive.

She complained that her arm burned.

At one point, she said it felt as though the arm might burst.

The state continued. AP News

From the family viewing room, May watched.

She later told People:

“I did not take my eyes off of her.”

May said she wanted Pike to remember Colleen. People.com

Raul noticed movement too.

After the first administration of pentobarbital, he remembered Pike lying on the gurney but repeatedly moving her toes.

May saw Pike lift her head.

Then the curtains closed.

When they reopened, Pike was still alive.

Tennessee administered the backup dose permitted by its protocol.

The family then heard noises Raul described as “snoring or gurgling.” People.com

The execution still did not end in death.

Eventually, the curtain closed again.

This time, it did not reopen for the family.

The procedure had reached the end of Tennessee’s written lethal-injection protocol.

Pike was alive.

At some point afterward, an ambulance arrived.

The state that had spent decades seeking permission to kill her now had to transfer her to doctors whose task was to keep her alive.

For May Martinez, that reversal was almost impossible to process.

She had waited thirty-one years.

Driven from Florida.

Sat inside the prison nearly all day.

Watched both authorized rounds of execution drugs administered.

And still left without the result Tennessee had told her to expect.

“We can’t get justice for my daughter,” she told People. People.com

That statement has become the center of the family’s reaction.

Pike’s attorneys describe September 30 as a constitutional catastrophe.

Human-rights organizations call it evidence of the cruelty of lethal injection.

Medical experts are investigating what happened to the IV lines.

Politicians are debating execution methods.

May sees something different.

She sees Colleen disappearing from the story again.

Colleen Slemmer was nineteen years old when she left Florida for Knoxville.

She had gone there through the Job Corps program because she wanted vocational training and was interested in computers.

Family members remember much more than the circumstances of her death.

They describe her as energetic, helpful and interested in building a future.

She volunteered with people with disabilities and loved activities such as roller skating.

Before she became a name attached permanently to one of Tennessee’s most notorious capital cases, she was somebody’s daughter, sister and friend. https://www.wvlt.tv

That is what May has spent decades trying to preserve.

Pike, eighteen at the time, was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996.

The killing was extraordinarily violent.

The prosecution said Pike believed Colleen was a romantic rival and helped lure her to an isolated area near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus.

Pike was sentenced to death.

Tadaryl Shipp, who was seventeen at the time, received a life sentence because his age made him ineligible for capital punishment.

Shadolla Peterson cooperated with prosecutors and received a much lighter sentence. AP News

From May’s perspective, the disparity itself became part of the long frustration.

Years became decades.

Appeals followed appeals.

Hearings reopened old facts.

Pike became known nationally as one of the youngest women ever sentenced to death.

Arguments developed around Pike’s childhood abuse, mental-health history, age at the crime and whether her original defense adequately presented mitigating evidence.

May watched those arguments accumulate around the woman who killed her daughter.

She believed Colleen’s suffering was increasingly being treated as background.

Then September 30 finally arrived.

And even that did not end the case.

Morgan Seeley, Colleen’s niece, says the failed execution has hit her grandmother especially hard.

Seeley told WSMV that May was so upset afterward that she could barely speak through her crying.

She also said May had not eaten in the days immediately following the failed execution.

For Seeley, Pike’s imprisonment itself never represented the conclusion her grandmother wanted.

“Being in prison was not justice,” she said. https://www.wsmv.com

The family wants Tennessee to make a decision quickly.

Seeley said officials need to determine what comes next within months—not drag the question out for another two years.

That demand now collides directly with Governor Bill Lee’s response.

Lee suspended the remaining Tennessee execution scheduled for 2026 and ordered an independent review.

Former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton has been retained to conduct that investigation.

Stanton previously led the review triggered by Tennessee’s lethal-injection problems in 2022. https://www.wsmv.com

For Slemmer’s relatives, another review means another delay.

For the state, proceeding without one could be impossible.

This was Tennessee’s second failed execution attempt of 2026.

In May, officials abandoned the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers because they could not establish the required secondary IV line.

With Pike, they got much further.

They placed IVs.

They administered pentobarbital.

They administered the backup dose.

And they still did not produce death. AP News

Three days after Pike’s execution attempt, Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada announced his resignation.

Strada maintained that he believed department personnel had followed protocol.

Nevertheless, he said leaving the position was in the public interest while the independent investigation proceeded.

Governor Lee accepted the resignation and said an interim commissioner would be appointed. Reuters

That resignation added another dimension to the Slemmer family’s anger.

September 30 was no longer simply an unsuccessful medical procedure.

It had become a crisis reaching the top of Tennessee’s correctional system.

Raul Martinez has been more openly furious.

On social media, he wrote that he did not believe Colleen could truly rest while Pike remained alive.

His language toward Pike was extremely harsh.

It reflected decades of grief rather than the measured vocabulary of courts and government reviews.

The important point is not the insult itself.

It is that the family experienced the execution failure not as a technical mistake but as another extension of the original trauma.

The state had invited them to witness an ending.

Then it failed to provide one.

May has also said she does not understand how the procedure could have gone so badly.

After the execution attempt, she and Raul were moved from the viewing area into another room.

They waited again.

May says they eventually spoke with the corrections commissioner but received little definite information about Pike’s condition.

They knew an ambulance had taken Pike away.

They did not know whether she would live or die. People.com

For a family that had been waiting since 1995, uncertainty had returned almost immediately.

And the uncertainty remains.

Pike’s latest medical condition is significantly worse than some of the earliest post-execution reports suggested.

Her attorneys now say she has remained unconscious and dependent on mechanical ventilation.

On Sunday, October 4, attorney Stephen Ferrell said he was not aware of Pike regaining consciousness at any point after the failed execution.

Doctors are still dealing with the enormous amount of pentobarbital administered to her.

Her prognosis may not be clear for several more days. AP News

Her arms suffered substantial injuries.

Lawyers describe burns and blistering.

They allege the pentobarbital infiltrated surrounding tissue rather than remaining entirely inside functioning veins.

That allegation may ultimately help explain why a nominally lethal quantity failed to kill her.

The independent review has not yet reached a final conclusion. Reuters

Pike’s defense team is already asking Lee to commute her sentence to life imprisonment.

They argue that after what Tennessee inflicted on her September 30, another attempt would be intolerable.

They have also gone to court seeking preservation of records, communications, photographs, video and other evidence connected with the execution.

If Tennessee eventually seeks a second execution date, all of that material could become part of a major Eighth Amendment challenge. AP News

The Slemmer family rejects the idea that Pike’s survival should mean the death sentence ends.

That creates the most emotionally difficult conflict in the case.

Pike’s attorneys say their client has already endured an execution attempt that caused severe physical injury and potentially neurological damage.

May Martinez says her daughter endured something from which there was no recovery.

Those are not competing medical claims.

They are competing conceptions of justice.

May also disputes the portrayal of Pike as remorseful.

She told People that Pike had never apologized directly to her over the thirty-one years since the murder.

Pike’s clemency materials, by contrast, included expressions of remorse and statements acknowledging the enormous pain she caused.

Both facts can coexist: a prisoner may express remorse through lawyers or legal filings without having personally apologized to the victim’s mother.

For May, that distinction matters. People.com

The debate around Pike’s execution has also begun producing political reactions that the family may ultimately support for very different reasons.

Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton has said lawmakers should focus on Colleen and her family rather than allowing the entire story to become about Pike.

He has called for an examination of alternative execution methods and possible changes to the state’s lethal-injection process.

Other Tennessee Republicans have made similar arguments.

Death-penalty opponents interpret September 30 as evidence that executions cannot reliably be made humane.

Some supporters interpret it as evidence that Tennessee needs a different way to carry them out. https://www.wsmv.com

The Slemmer family does not have the power to decide which direction Tennessee chooses.

But their voices carry enormous moral weight in the political debate because they were not observers arriving after the controversy began.

They have lived inside the case since 1995.

May attended Pike’s trial.

She sat through the evidence.

She waited through decades of appeals.

She drove back to Tennessee when officials finally set an execution date.

Then she watched the punishment fail.

That chronology helps explain why calls for patience may sound very different to her than they sound to investigators.

For the state, waiting several months for a detailed independent report may be responsible governance.

For May, it is more waiting after thirty-one years of waiting.

That is why her niece’s demand is so specific.

Not years.

Months.

Tell the family what happens next. https://www.wsmv.com

There is one more painful detail from May’s account of September 30.

She had wanted to hold Colleen’s photograph during the execution.

The day became so disorganized that she never experienced the moment the way she had imagined it.

That may sound minor compared with the medical catastrophe unfolding on the other side of the glass.

For May, it was not minor.

The photograph represented the entire reason she was there.

Not Tennessee’s protocol.

Not pentobarbital.

Not the politics of capital punishment.

Colleen.

A nineteen-year-old whose future ended in January 1995.

The failed execution has again made Pike one of the most discussed prisoners in America.

Her health is news.

Her attorneys are news.

Her burned arms are news.

Her constitutional claims will be news.

Whether Tennessee can execute her again will become news.

May Martinez is asking people not to let that attention erase the person whose death created the case in the first place.

That is the message coming from Colleen Slemmer’s family now.

They are angry at Pike.

They are angry at the state.

They are exhausted by delay.

And they do not consider thirty-one years in prison the justice they were promised.

Meanwhile, Christa Pike remains unconscious in a hospital.

Her lawyers do not yet know whether she will fully recover.

Tennessee does not yet know exactly why its execution failed.

The corrections commissioner is leaving.

The governor has stopped executions for the rest of the year.

An independent investigator is beginning his work.

And May Martinez is back where she has been for much of her adult life.

Waiting.

Except this time, she had already stood behind the glass and watched the state try.

She believed that would be the final chapter.

Instead, the failed execution produced another one.

And the family of Colleen Slemmer is making clear that whatever Tennessee decides next, they do not want Colleen forgotten in the argument over the woman who survived killing her.