May Martinez is driving more than eight hours from the Jacksonville area of Florida toward Nashville with a pH๏τograph of her daughter. She has made versions of this trip for three decades. This one is different because Tennessee 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 and 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 pH๏τograph during the witness process so the room cannot treat the victim as an abstraction.

“It’s never about the victims,” she has said. “It’s like Colleen was never there.” She does not plan to speak to Pike. Her husband, Raul, may. After 31 years she has decided the picture is the only thing left that still does the work speech no longer does. The date falls ten days after Colleen’s birthday on September 20, a birthday her daughter 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 Raul, a disabled veteran on a fixed income, are paying for gas, a H๏τel, food, and animal care without state ᴀssistance. They have already spent a generation on court dates and letters. An online campaign later helped with travel costs after supporters said a mother should not have to choose between a mortgage payment and being present when the sentence is carried out. The pH๏τograph is not a prop in Martinez’s account.

It is the method she chose after she spent 16 years fighting to recover a fragment of her daughter’s skull that Pike kept and that the state held as evidence. She has described opening parcels from insтιтutions that sent remains in pieces, without warning, in cardboard. She has said the state put her life upside down in the courtroom by placing the skull in front of her before she was prepared to see it. Until the case ends, she has said, she will not feel that justice has arrived. After a special master’s ruling she told reporters that Pike committed the crime and should pay for it, and that a painless death is not the measure of what was done to Colleen. Pike, she has said in interviews, has never apologized to her or to Pike’s own family.

Martinez outlived one daughter murdered in 1995 and another lost later to COVID. She is packing a picture instead of a speech. The country has rediscovered Pike as a consтιтutional problem, a gender milestone, a protocol test, and a clemency file for a governor. Martinez’s focus is narrower. She wants the room to see 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 around 10 or 10:15 p.m. Colleen had been encouraged by her grandfather to go to Job Corps. She painted school buildings, roller-skated, ran, and was, her mother said, “a nerd. But a good nerd.” On the last evening she told her mother that three students were bothering her. Then the line failed. The drive is eight hours. The pH๏τograph is the item Martinez has said she will raise when she arrives. She has waited long enough, she has said, and she wants her daughter to rest. The legal system can talk about adolescence, trauma, and the first woman in two centuries. Martinez talks about a table that is still missing a place.

Source: New York Post