Krista Peck panicked and told medical staff she thought her arm was going to “explode” and asked if something went wrong during her execution in Tennessee, her attorney said Friday.
Pack, 50, who is on death row for the brutal 1995 murder of a classmate, remains comatose and intubated after a failed execution attempt. According to court documents, she was given two fatal doses of pentobarbital – which drug experts likened to “bleach” or “drano”.
Pike’s attorneys said in the filing that medical staff poked Pike with at least seven needles before entering the vein, including one that “bent at a 90-degree angle” when it was withdrawn.
“My arm felt like it was going to explode,” she said Wednesday during the fatal surgery at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Facility.
Pike then asked her all-female firing squad: “Could this happen?”
Witnesses heard her crying and gasping for air throughout the ordeal, according to her lawyer.
Parker’s experts say the execution drug pentobarbital is a corrosive, highly alkaline chemical that can burn the body’s muscles, tissues and veins on contact, similar to household chemicals such as “bleach” or “drano”.
When she was taken to a Nashville hospital, her arms were swollen, severely burned and blistered, according to court documents.
Pike is the only person in history to survive a lethal injection after the drug entered his bloodstream.
Her attorney, Randy Spivey, said she has been in critical condition since the botched execution and may suffer permanent brain damage.
In January 1995, 18-year-old Peck brutally murdered her 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in a jealous rage, believing, according to her confession, that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend.
Pike, along with her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, 17, and friend Shadolla Peterson, 18, lured Slimer to a remote area on the University of Tennessee-Knoxville campus, tortured and killed her.
Pike ended Slimer’s life by smashing her head in with a piece of asphalt, then kept a piece of the victim’s skull as a keepsake of his illness. In 1996, she was sentenced to death.
Shipp was sentenced to life in prison because he was a minor, while Peterson received probation for being an accomplice after testifying against the two.