May Martinez did not pack a speech. She packed a pH๏τograph of her daughter and an eight-hour drive from the Jacksonville area of Florida to Nashville, because after thirty-one years she believes the country has learned every detail about the woman scheduled to die and almost nothing that would make Colleen Slemmer feel present in the room. Colleen was 19 on January 12, 1995, a Job Corps student who wore a “Computer Geek” shirt, painted school buildings, roller-skated, and, her mother still says, trusted people too easily. That trust is the sentence Martinez cannot stop repeating. On the last evening of Colleen’s life she told her mother that three students were bothering her. She tried to call home again later. The signal dropped. When Martinez called back around 10 or 10:15 p.m., her daughter was already gone.

The killing that followed became a national true-crime object: jealousy, a lie about making peace, a wooded path on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, a prolonged attack, a pentagram carved into the victim’s chest, a fragment of skull taken back to campus. Pike, then 18, was sentenced to death. Tadaryl Shipp, 17, received life because he was not eligible for execution. A third teenager acted as lookout. Only one of them has been the subject of a 226-page clemency peтιтion, expert reports on brain development, and a governor’s review. Martinez has said the imbalance is the point. “It’s never about the victims,” she has told reporters. “It’s like Colleen was never there.” She intends to sit in the witness process with the pH๏τograph in her hand so the room cannot treat the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ girl as an abstraction. She has said she will not speak to Pike. Her husband, Raul Martinez, a disabled veteran on a fixed income, may say something. She will not. “Saying something to her now, after all these years, that she never apologized — never even tried — or her family. What’s the point?” The trip itself is not ceremonial. The couple has spent a generation on court dates, letters, gas, H๏τels, and missed work.

An online campaign and the Justice Coalition of Jacksonville helped raise more than $2,500 after supporters said a mother should not have to choose between a mortgage payment and being present when the sentence is carried out. September is already a cruel month in that household. September 20 is Colleen’s birthday. The end of the month also marks years since Martinez lost another daughter to COVID. She has said she also lost a dog in mid-September. Ordinary places still empty without warning: a mall, a skating rink, a holiday table.

For sixteen years she fought the state to recover a fragment of her daughter’s skull that had been kept as evidence after Pike showed it to other students. Martinez has described receiving remains in pieces, brown boxes arriving without warning, and a courtroom moment in which the fragment was placed in front of her before she was prepared to see it. She has said Colleen had to be disturbed again and again as parts were returned. That history is why the pH๏τograph is not a prop. It is the method she chose after speech stopped working. She has heard the arguments against the execution, including that Pike would never again sit at a family table. “Yeah, Colleen never did either,” she answered. She has said she wants the sentence carried out so her daughter “finally can be resting,” and she has also said she is not sure the morning will give her the word people keep offering her: closure. What she is sure of is narrower. She is driving. She is bringing the picture. She wants the witness room to look at the girl who never got thirty years of appeals.

Source: New York Post