The botched execution of convicted killer Christa Pike in Tennessee is forcing a Northeast Florida family to reckon again with Pike’s 1995 murder of Orange Park teen Colleen Slemmer.
“I said, ‘Here we are, 31 years [later], and you’re laughing in my face again.’ And that’s what I feel like they did,” Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told Jacksonville’s First Coast News after Pike survived the September 30 lethal injections that were supposed to end her life.
“[U]nfortunately Colleen’s soul cannot rest until this monster succumbs to the 2 doses of Pentobarbital that she was given,” Martinez’s husband, Raul Martinez, posted on Facebook October 1. “…[T]his bitch will haunt Colleen’s heavenly journey until she’s been wiped off the face of the earth.”
The couple traveled to Nashville to be present at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution when Pike’s death sentence was carried out.
Doing that hadn’t been easy and the Justice Coalition victim advocacy group helped raise more than $2,500 to cover travel-related expenses, First Coast News reported September 28.
“She killed my daughter and I don’t want to see another child or another person hurt like she did,” May Martinez, 73, told the station in September.
Slemmer was 19 when she traveled to Knoxville and entered a Job Corps training program, the Times-Union reported in 2001.
In January 1995, she went one night with three other teens to a field on a University of Tennessee agricultural campus, thinking she was safe, but was attacked by the others, the newspaper reported.
Slemmer was cut, stabbed and beaten, a pentagram shape was cut into her chest and her head was beaten with a chunk of asphalt, the Times-Union reported. The newspaper said Pike, acting as the group’s leader, took a piece of Slemmer’s skull that was later found in Pike’s jacket.
That part of Slemmer’s remains was treated as crime-scene evidence and the paper said that in 2001 Pike’s attorney continued to oppose releasing the skull remains to Martinez.
"I can put her to rest," Martinez said at the time, "but I will never put what happened to rest.”
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Failed execution revives pain for Florida family of Christa Pike victim
