Christa Pike’s IV Team Suspected Vein ‘Might Be Blowing’ Before Failed Execution, Lawyer Says in New Filing

Newly filed legal documents are pulling back the curtain on the tense scene inside the execution chamber before Christa Pike‘s lethal injection went wrong.

Pike’s attorney, Randy Spivey, submitted the filing, which The Guardian obtained. It offers the most detailed account yet of the critical stretch between the moment the execution team started hunting for a vein and the moment the procedure was declared a failure.

According to Spivey, the IV team was already struggling by 6:53 p.m., when he overheard members discussing whether the 50-year-old death row inmate’s vein “might be blowing.” Four minutes later, he alleges, that same team member and a colleague “inspected the insertion site and poked it. Both said that they ‘can’t tell,'” the lawyer said.

Two minutes after that, the team believed they’d finally located a vein. But when they withdrew the needle, Spivey says, it “appeared to be severely bent,” and they had to start over.

The account lends weight to a leading theory about what went wrong: that Pike’s vein collapsed and the pentobarbital seeped into the surrounding tissue of her arm rather than entering her bloodstream. It would also help explain her words at 7:34 p.m., when she said it felt “like my arm is about to bust.”

The timeline is striking: The IV team started searching for a vein at 6:35 p.m. By the time they left the death chamber at 7:24 p.m., believing the job was done, nearly an hour had passed.

As Globe previously reported, Pike is now speaking in full sentences three weeks after surviving two doses of the drug intended to kill her. However, doctors still aren’t sure whether she’ll suffer lasting physical or cognitive effects.

Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 after being convicted of first-degree murder for the 1995 killing of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer. She was 18 years old at the time of the murder.