May Martinez is leaving the Jacksonville, Florida, area with a pH๏τograph of her daughter and a drive of more than eight hours to Nashville. She has made versions of this trip for three decades. This one is different because the state has set a date. Colleen Slemmer was 19 on January 12, 1995, when she was lured from the Knoxville Job Corps onto a pathway on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, beaten, slashed and killed. Christa Pike was 18. Two other teenagers were involved. Only Pike received a death sentence. Martinez has told Tennessee reporters that she intends to hold Colleen’s picture in the witness process so the room cannot pretend the victim was an abstraction. “It’s never about the victims,” she has said. “It’s like Colleen was never there.” She has also said she will not speak to Pike. Her husband may. She will raise the pH๏τograph. That is the sentence she has chosen after 31 years.

The country that has rediscovered Pike as a legal test case has not, in Martinez’s view, rediscovered Colleen. September 20 is Colleen’s birthday. The execution is scheduled for September 30, ten days after a birthday the girl never lived past 19. Martinez has described ordinary places — a mall, a skating rink, a holiday table — as rooms that still empty without warning. She and her husband, Raul, a disabled veteran living on a fixed income, have said the state is not paying for the trip. Gas, a H๏τel, food, and someone to watch their animals come out of a household that has already spent a generation on court dates and letters. They have said they would skip a mortgage payment if that is what it takes to be in Nashville. Martinez spent 16 years fighting to recover a piece of her daughter’s skull that Pike kept and that the state held as evidence. She has said she received it after years of writing. She has also said that until the case is finished she will not feel that justice arrived. Her public comments after the special master’s ruling were blunt: Pike did the crime and should pay for it; a painless death, in her view, is not the measure of what was done to Colleen.

The pH๏τograph is not a prop invented for television. It is the method Martinez has chosen because speech, she says, no longer has a purpose. Pike has never apologized to her, she has told interviewers, and neither has Pike’s family.

So the mother who has outlived one daughter murdered in 1995 and another lost later to COVID is packing a picture instead of a speech. She is driving toward a prison that most of the country will discuss as a consтιтutional problem, a gender milestone, a protocol test, or a clemency file on a governor’s desk. Martinez’s argument is narrower and older. She wants the room to look at the girl who was 19, who tried to call home that night, whose signal dropped, and who was already gone when her mother called back. The drive is eight hours. The pH๏τograph is the only thing she has said she will hold up when she gets there.

Source: New York Post