TENNESSEE-(MaraviPost)-For almost a week the world has talked about Christa Pike, about her survival, her hospital bed, and now the news that she is awake, conscious and speaking after Tennessee failed to execute her with two lethal doses of pentobarbital, as first confirmed Monday by her attorneys in a statement quoted by CNN.
But behind those headlines is a mother who has waited 31 years for justice that never came.
May Martinez, the mother of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, drove 11 hours from Florida to Tennessee to watch Pike’s execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on September 30, according to PEOPLE Magazine.
She arrived at 8:30 in the morning and did not leave until 8 at night.
She told PEOPLE that she stood in front of the execution window and did not take her eyes off Pike, wanting her to remember who Colleen was and what she did to her.
Instead of closure, she watched Pike lift her head, move her toes, and continue breathing after the drugs were given, with witnesses reporting snoring and gurgling sounds behind the curtain, as reported by PEOPLE and WBIR Channel 10.
According to PEOPLE, May said she had a strange feeling beforehand that Pike would survive.
She said she doubted Tennessee would ever try again, a fear that grew stronger after Governor Bill Lee halted all executions for the rest of 2026, as reported by The Tennessean.
After the failed attempt, May and her husband Raul were taken to a back room where they waited over an hour for the commissioner, who could tell them almost nothing about whether Pike would live or die, PEOPLE reports.
They drove back to Florida with no answers, and according to PEOPLE, May said Tennessee owed her an apology.
When asked what she wanted to happen next, now that Pike is conscious and speaking in a Nashville hospital, a development confirmed by her attorneys to CNN and USA Today, May gave the most heartbreaking answer of this entire case. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she said, as quoted in recent reporting. Those six words carry the weight of more than three decades of waiting.
In earlier interviews with PEOPLE and WBIR Channel 10, May had been clear.
She said the whole day was supposed to be her justice but she felt she had failed her daughter.
She said Colleen was a bright girl who loved computers and retro video games, who called her that final night of January 12, 1995 to say three students were bothering her, as May recounted to The Tennessean and PEOPLE. That was the last time May ever heard her daughter’s voice.
Hours later Colleen was lured to a wooded area behind the University of Tennessee agricultural campus and brutally murdered, according to court records cited by The Tennessean.
May has lived with that horror every day since, fighting for years even to recover a piece of Colleen’s skull that Pike kept as a trophy so she could give her daughter a complete burial, as documented by The Tennessean.
She told PEOPLE in 2021, “I think about Colleen every day, every minute, every year. She’s always on my mind.” She said Pike has never apologized or shown remorse, according to PEOPLE.
Now as the debate shifts to whether Pike’s awakening is a miracle or whether Tennessee should try to execute her again, May Martinez is still living with what cannot be changed. Colleen Slemmer was only 19. She never got to grow older, build a future, or come home to her mother.
No court decision, no hospital recovery, and no execution date will ever bring her back, and as May told PEOPLE, that is the justice she has been denied for 31 years.
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