May Martinez did not come to Nashville on September 30, 2026, to watch a procedure. She came to watch an ending. Her daughter, Colleen Slemmer, was 19 when she was murdered in Knoxville on January 12, 1995, and Martinez had spent 31 years telling reporters, courts, and anyone who would listen that the death sentence imposed on Christa Gail Pike in 1996 was the only result she would accept. She traveled for the warrant. She stood at the window. She later told interviewers she did not take her eyes off Pike, because she wanted the woman on the gurney to remember who Colleen was. What she watched instead was a lethal injection that did not kill.

Martinez’s account, given to the ᴀssociated Press the next day, is the bluntest witness statement in the case. She said Pike was awake. She said Pike moved her head and her feet and tried to sit up. She said the first sH๏τ did not work and the second sH๏τ did not work, and that Pike left the building alive and went to a hospital. To the ᴀssociated Press she said she did not get justice for her daughter. In a separate interview she called the attempt a mess. She also said Pike showed no remorse in that room and had never apologized to her for taking Colleen’s life. A niece, Morgan Sealy, told a Nashville station that her grandmother had gone in with high hopes and was crying the next morning. Sealy’s own description was short: frustrating, and draining.

The stepfather’s reaction landed in a different register. Raul Martinez posted that he was not a happy camper and called the execution botched. In an interview he asked a question the State of Tennessee has not answered in public: how do you botch killing somebody? He noted that Tennessee uses one drug, pentobarbital, rather than the three-drug sequence still ᴀssociated in the public mind with lethal injection. The family’s anger is not abstract. They paid to be in the city. They sat through a day of last-minute court fights. They were present for the moment the sentence was supposed to become a fact.

By October 7 the mother’s tone had shifted from fury to resignation. Martinez told WBIR she had expected Pike to survive. Asked what she wanted now that Pike was awake and speaking, she said it did not matter what she thought, because the State would do what it was going to do. She also said she did not believe Tennessee would try again. That is a remarkable sentence from a woman who had wanted the execution carried out. It suggests she has already priced in a second failure, or a political decision not to risk one. Neither the governor nor the Department of Correction has told her which of those futures is real.

The family is now living inside a story that is no longer about Colleen. Every fresh dispatch is about Pike’s pneumonia, her arms, her shackles, her lawyers, and whether a second warrant would be cruel and unusual. Martinez’s October 1 line still sits under all of it. She watched the whole thing. She did not get justice for her daughter. Until someone in Nashville tells that family whether the 1996 sentence is still the plan, the night of September 30 remains an open wound with a living defendant on the other side of the glᴀss.