Christa Pike was supposed to die on Wednesday night. Twice, actually, since Tennessee gave her two separate doses of the lethal injection drug. Twice it didn’t work. And the whole time, Colleen Slemmer’s mother was standing a few feet away, pressed up against a window, watching every second of it.

That’s the part of this story that’s sticking with me. Not just that an execution went sideways, which, let’s be honest, happens more often than most people realize. It’s that a mother who waited nearly three decades for this moment had to sit there and watch it fall apart in real time.

Who Was in That Room, and Why It Took This Long

May Martinez and her husband Raul drove 11 hours from Florida to Nashville just to be there. Eleven hours. That’s not a quick trip you squeeze in on a whim, that’s a commitment, the kind you make when you’ve been waiting a very, very long time for something to finally be over.

And they had been waiting. Colleen Slemmer was murdered back in the 1990s in one of the most notorious killings in Tennessee’s history, the kind of case that sticks around in true crime circles for decades because of how brutal it was. Christa Pike, now 50, has sat on death row essentially her entire adult life for it. Think about that for a second. She was convicted in her teens. She’s spent more years as a condemned woman than she spent as a free one.

So when the execution was finally scheduled at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, you can imagine what that meant for the Martinez family. Closure. Finally. Except that’s not what they got.

What Actually Happened in the Death Chamber

Here’s where it gets genuinely unsettling. Pike received a lethal injection. It didn’t kill her. Officials, from what’s being reported, administered a second dose. That one didn’t work either. Two attempts, two failures, with the victim’s own mother standing on the other side of the glass watching all of it unfold. The full timeline of those two attempts, two failures is laid out in detail elsewhere.

I’ve covered executions before, botched ones too, and I still don’t think most people grasp how often “lethal injection” doesn’t go the way it’s shown in movies. It’s not a light switch. It’s a medical procedure being performed, often imperfectly, by people who aren’t always trained like actual anesthesiologists because, well, most medical boards won’t let their members participate in executions. That tension has been quietly breaking the system for years. This is just the latest, most visible crack in it.

What Does Justice Even Look Like Here?

May Martinez didn’t blink. By her own account, she stood there and watched Pike “very, very carefully.”

“I stood in front of that window, and I watched her very, very carefully. I did not take my eyes off of her,” May Martinez said. “I wanted her to remember who Colleen was and what they’ve done and never forget that thought, no matter where she goes.”

That’s a mother who has spent decades carrying her daughter’s name into every courtroom, every hearing, every parole update, and now, apparently, every failed execution attempt. I’m not going to pretend I know what that feels like. Nobody who hasn’t lived it does. But I can tell you that quote hit me harder than most things I’ve read this year.

And here’s the thing that really gets under my skin: she drove 11 hours expecting an ending. What she got instead was a cliffhanger. A legal and medical mess that, as of now, doesn’t have a clean resolution. “We can’t get justice,” she said, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration born out of grief. I think it’s an accurate description of what happens when a state-run process fails at the one job it was there to do.

So What Happens Now?

Honestly? It’s not entirely clear yet. When an execution fails like this, twice, it opens up a whole legal can of worms. Does the state try again later. Does this count as cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment, which is an argument defense attorneys have made for years about lethal injection protocols generally. Does Pike’s legal team use this as grounds for an appeal, a stay, or something else entirely. None of that is settled, and I’d be lying if I said I could predict how it shakes out.

What I do know is that this isn’t the first time a lethal injection has gone wrong in this country, and it probably won’t be the last. States keep tweaking drug cocktails, keep running into supply shortages because manufacturers don’t want their products used this way, keep running into execution teams that aren’t always equipped for what they’re doing. It’s a system held together with duct tape in a lot of states, and when it fails, it doesn’t fail quietly. It fails in front of grieving families who drove 11 hours expecting an answer.

What This Actually Means

Look, I’m not here to tell you how you should feel about the death penalty. People have strong, deeply held opinions on both sides, and that’s not going away because of one botched night in Nashville. But I will say this: whatever you think capital punishment should accomplish, closure, justice, deterrence, whatever word you want to use, it can’t accomplish any of it if the state can’t even reliably carry it out.

May Martinez didn’t get the ending she drove 11 hours for. She got a half-finished sentence and a daughter who’s been gone for decades without the resolution she was promised. I don’t know what happens to Christa Pike next. Nobody does yet. But I know this much: when the system fails this publicly, this visibly, in front of the person who has waited the longest for it to work, it’s not just a procedural hiccup. It’s a failure that someone has to answer for.