A Lethal Injection Failed to Kill Her. Twice.

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Now Israel's making big claims about what this guy planned to do. And where there's smoke, there's a satellite ready to spot a fire. They can detect any fire the size of a cluster more larger anywhere across the globe. With sentiment shifting against AI, firefighters say they've never needed it more. From ABC News, this is Start Here. I'm Brad Milky. We expected the Christa Pikes execution would be unique, but we did not expect this. For 30 years, Pike has been one of just a few dozen women in America on death row. She's the only one in Tennessee. In fact, she was expected to be the first woman put to death there in 200 years. And leading up to Wednesday, there was actually still a lot of uncertainty over whether this execution would happen as planned. Courts went back and forth over whether this should be halted to consider various legal factors. At one point, Pike thought she had been temporarily spared. Then the US Supreme Court stepped in to say she would die as scheduled on Wednesday night. And yet late that night, we started seeing reports from those in the room that something had gone wrong, horrifically wrong, a warning that some of the descriptions here will be graphic. By all accounts, Pike had been given a lethal injection. And yet it didn't work. They injected her again. And as horrified onlookers realized, this woman still wasn't dead, staffers rushed to close a curtain over that window. Yesterday, her lawyer announced she's still alive. Tennessee has said now it won't be executing anyone else this year, but critics say that announcement has come far too late. ABC's Peter Harlembos has been following all this. Peter, it's just so shocking. How exactly did this go down? Yeah, Brad, this is an execution that's been 30 years in the making that went terribly wrong. So after hours of legal uncertainty that day, reporters were serving as witnesses showed up ready to see this execution. A curtain opens up. It shows Chris the Pike ready to get this lethal injection. The warden asked Chris the Pike if she had any last words. She said I do. She said I'm at peace and I'm ready to go. They get the green light from the Supreme Court. So they go forward with that first dose of a drug called Pento Barbatol. It doesn't appear to have an effect. Witnesses in the room described her still breathing, looking around, describing a burning feeling. Now, Tennessee has a policy here. If the first dose of this drug doesn't work, you go to a second dose and that should hopefully do the trick, at least according to the state's policies. But in this case, for the first time, it didn't. She continued to show signs of life still breathing. That's when the snoring from Pike started. Her lip quivered at one point. It sounded like she was almost choking. By 805, the curtains closed for the witnesses. The mic was cut off after the warden said, well, the witnesses please exit the area. Even at 853 when the microphone was cut off, we could still hear snoring. You could see ambulances showing up to take her away. I will say I've witnessed. I believe five executions in Tennessee. Nothing about today was normal, typical at all. We now know from her lawyers that she's clinging to life. She's on life-saving care at this point. It's unclear what condition she's exactly in still at this point. But her heart, according to her lawyer, is still beating. The state of Tennessee has shown us again that they are not capable of carrying out an execution consistent with basic human dignity. Last night was not just inefficient. It was cruel and it was torturous. I don't mean to say any of this to understate the gruesiveness of the crime involved here. Back in 1995, Pike was convicted of basically luring a 19-year-old woman into the woods, torturing her, beating her with rocks, cutting her with a box cutter, carving a pentagram into her body. Now because she was an adult at the time of the incident, she got the death sentence. Her boyfriend at the time who also was involved in this gruesome killing was still a minor 17-years-old. So he got a life sentence and she's been trying to appeal this death penalty for quite a while. She argues that she has an extensive history of a traumatic childhood that has made an impact on her decision-making as well as a history of mental illness. That was really the heart of this appeal. It was ultimately unsuccessful, but now this story is entering a new chapter that's really unprecedented in terms of American executions. Yeah, exactly because Peter, the question is how does this happen? The lethal injection, this is supposed to be a cocktail of drugs that is a very predictable outcome. It makes you lose consciousness, it makes you stop breathing, it stops your heart in that order, is the idea. How does that go wrong? Yeah, that's the big question. Unfortunately, we don't have an answer. Governor of Tennessee Bill Lee made a statement in the morning on Thursday calling this tragic and deeply disturbing. I'm highly disappointed, along with Tennesseyans, about what happened last night. And putting a pause on capital punishment in the state for now, while they do a third-party review of what happened here. This is a process that was a protocol that was approved by the Attorney General's Office has been vetted. It's not the first instance, either. It's the second time in five months that we've seen a botched execution in the state, though the circumstances around that may execution that went wrong are slightly different. In that case, the individual who was being executed, they were unable to find his vein after multiple tries. In this case, they were able to apply two lethal doses and it just didn't work. Is that because, by the way, the doses, the fact that she's a woman and she's the only woman who's been executed in that state for 200, I mean, is that, would they have, like, changed the dosage for her? And that was an issue, do we know? I think traditionally dosing mattered. And the way the United States conducts executions has also changed pretty drastically over the last 15 years, Brad, about a decade ago. They didn't go with this pentobarbital. Instead, they used a three-drug cocktail to basically sedate you before stopping your heart. Now, the problem is these big pharmaceutical companies that traditionally produced these lethal meds said around 10 years ago that they don't want no part of this. They stopped making these drugs available to the United States where they were being used to kill inmates. And it's led to this scramble across the country, specifically in states where they still practice the death penalty to figure out how to kill inmates. And now, states basically have to go find it on their own. In the case of Tennessee, the paper there, the Tennessean has done some reporting about this. They concluded that the state has spent more than half a million dollars to track down drugs to do this. They have no idea where they come from, but ultimately the state has spent a ton of taxpayer money to acquire these things. And now, there are questions about how effective they are and whether or not what they did to this woman constitutes torture. Right, that's the thing, because you spend all that money and it still doesn't work and leaves a person in this liminal space between life and death. I mean, at what point is it just torture? So, what is next then for, I know they say they're halting executions for the rest of this year, but where does this leave the lethal injection in Tennessee and potentially elsewhere? Yeah, that's a great question. I think it kind of depends on how this review goes. If you look at Tennessee law, there's two options. The default choice is lethal injection. Electrocution is option two that's still technically available, even though the pause is on capital punishment as a whole, though I think at this point, now that this has happened twice, this third party reviews, trying to determine what went wrong here and how to fix this in the future. And one thing that the governor was asked about yesterday was the history of his corrections chief. The guy who runs prisons in Tennessee is a guy named Frank Strata, and he's been doing that job at this point for a few years, but before he ran things in Tennessee, he was the deputy of the prison system in Arizona. And notably in 2022, under his leadership, that state had three instances of what are reportedly botched executions in each of these executions. They basically struggled to find the vein in two of them. They ended up inserting something near the groin area in another example. They decided to go near the inmates hand after he suggested it in the middle of the execution. He suggested it had to kill him. This is the, at least I'm sorry. So the guy overseeing these executions where inmates had to suggest on how to kill them, he gets hired by Tennessee to run their, effectively run their prison and therefore execution program. That's exactly right. And the governor was asked explicitly, is this a problem that this person has a record of botched executions appearing to follow them. And for now, the governor has stood firm by his corrections chief. We've reached out as well to the Department of Corrections about the fact that there's this record of reportedly botched executions, and they pointed us to a similar statement about how this was done using the approved method in the state. And Brad, I just want to go back to Chris the Pike for a second. When you look at the lead up to this execution, one thing her lawyers were consistently arguing was that she did not want to die by lethal injection. And she even requested other methods, like hanging or firing squad, neither of which were on the books in Tennessee, but she said, "Do not kill me by lethal injection." They went ahead with the method and now her lawyers are saying, "Effectively, we told you so in terms of all the issues here that they raised about the lethal injection protocol." I mean, you can argue about should the state enforce the death penalty, but this was supposed to be the most humane version of the death penalty, and yet you see so many things going wrong with it, it seems the opposite of humane at times. Now her attorney saying, "The state failed twice, they should not get a third chance to execute her." We'll see how that goes. Peter Harlombos, thank you so much. Thanks so much, Brad. First of all, start here, what was he thinking when he stabbed his fellow pilot, Israel says they have an idea, or back in a bit? This show is sponsored by Zip Recruiter. Think a moment to think about some of the things you do to save time. Do you meal prep your lunches on Sunday nights or subscribe to regular deliveries for items you know you're always going to need? Maybe you have auto downloads on your podcasting apps, you never miss an episode to start here. Good choice. 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It was one thing for there to be a single clown sighting, and then there was a second one. How many more of these are we gonna have? That's why I'm streaming with Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for one subscriber, time to apply. The further we get from the near disaster on a fly-to-by flight to Israel on Wednesday, the more remarkable it becomes. One pilot attacking another in the cockpit, pointing the nose of the plane at the ground. Our aviation contributor Stephen Ganyard said he was amazed the plane was able to be pulled out of this dive, considering the G-forces could conceivably rip the wings off the aircraft. This is one of many details that could have made this so much more deadly, but the big question remains, why? Why would the first officer do this? And if he was intent on killing himself and others, how did they get on this flight in the first place? Let's talk to ABC's foreign correspondent Tom Sufi Burj, who is in Tel Aviv right now. Tom, first off, you've been speaking to passengers, right, as they came in to Tel Aviv. What have they been telling you? Yeah, that's right, Brad. We're spoken to Shota Musaev, he's an Israeli dentist, he was sitting in row 13 alongside his wife. Initially, he just felt the plane start moving erratically from side to side. In his videos, you can hear people screaming out, including his wife, as the plane plunged up to the side. And once the plane had leveled out, he then decided to rush forward. So you walked to the front of the plane? Yes, yes. What did you hear and see? More blood, pilot on the floor. So the first officer who allegedly stabbed the captain, both of those pilots, were lying on the floor, there was a lot of blood. And Musaev began to administer first aid to the captain. Did you think that the captain might die? Yes, yes, of course. Of course. And he said the captain had been stabbed in the back of the head and badly on his hands, and over time he managed to stem the bleeding. The most interesting thing he told us, I think, was about the suspect, the first officer who was also lying on the ground. Claude de Hens. He tied his hands up. Yes, he did. We did a headphone. Headphones to tie his hands. He said the suspect didn't really say very much, but at one point somebody asked him where he was from. He confirmed that he was from Oman. And then at one point, he said sometimes, "Kill me, please, kill me, please." And he basically told Shota Musaev and the other passengers in cabin crew who were crowded around the two pilots that he wanted to die. Interesting. This is the big question, whether this man was trying to kill himself in kind of a moment of psychological trauma or was this a cold-blooded act of terrorism where he's trying to kill a bunch of Israelis sitting behind him, is there a sense as to who this guy was and what he might have been trying to do? But from the Israeli side, we have been getting more of a narrative about the suspect. And Israeli officials have been saying that he was, quote, "radicalized" and also suicidal. We've also been hearing from a spokesperson close to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Sanyahu, saying that there were posts on social media by the suspect in which he allegedly discussed killing Jews. And the attacker, the co-pilot, who attacked the captain, is now being interrogated. But here's what we do know. First, we know that the underwent Islamist radical indoctrination that appears to be something we're gathering. So that was Netanyahu talking on Fox. I think there are still questions, though, exactly what evidence there is. And I think it's worth underlining that the United Arab Emirates have also put out a statement in the last 24 hours or so, saying that their attorney general is investigating whether or not there was a possible terrorist link to this incident, and also trying to work out established if there was any kind of prior planning before it took place. So still uncertainty, though, is what I'm hearing because they're describing both he was radicalized and he was suicidal, like, so which was at play here. The other thing that I know is getting a lot of play is whether this guy should have been on the plane of the first place. I know Israel has a policy where if you are from a country that doesn't recognize Israel diplomatically, your pilots are not supposed to fly there. This guy was from Oman. Like you said, well, they don't have diplomatic ties with Israel. And then if you got on somehow with a weapon, that's an even bigger deal, although some are saying maybe he used the axe that is in the cockpit in case pilots ever had to get their way out in an emergency. What happens to the captain now? And the first officer, I mean, he's still alive. Yeah. So actually, the first officer was arrested in Saudi Arabia, detained and interrogated according to Israeli officials. He has been transferred to the United Arab Emirates. As has the captain, the hero captain, Simt Mashar, an Indian national, who really saved the day. I mean, he was under attack being stabbed. He managed to get the cockpit door open so that the passengers could go in and subdue the first officer. According to Indian officials, his condition is now good and he is recovering well and his family has even been able to visit him at the hospital. I asked him, he said to me, "Have tall children." He told you to do that. He lived by. The captain, according to Shoto Musayev, he was talking about his family and how he wanted to see them again. He didn't want to die. And there was also this emotional moment from Shoto Musayev when he spoke about how moments later, when things had calmed down on the flight, he just took a moment to go back to the road 13, where he had been seated, where his wife had remained all along and gave her a kiss and a hug. According to him, she had been looking after other passengers around the flight. It had really dawned on him at that point. You understand? We were five, ten seconds from then. And I said, "You're a hero." No. I said, "You're a hero." No. No. Everyone. Every passengers held. Not only any. I noticed videos of everyone cheering on that flight, taking selfies as they finally landed back in Tel Aviv after they'd been put on another flight after their emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Yeah. Lucky road 13, in his case, unbelievable eye. Tom Sufi Burj. There in Tel Aviv. Thank you so much. Thanks, Brad. The last two weeks have been perhaps the two most alarming weeks for artificial intelligence since Americans started regularly using this phrase. Even AI has apologized for multiple hacks committed by its own systems without prodding from humans. I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today. The CEO of Anthropic is out there begging his colleagues to slow their role, even though President Trump and basically all of Wall Street have tied their fortunes to the success of AI. In fact, with public support waning, President Trump is now declared it should actually be called a new name, S-I, super intelligence. We use the other word super because the other word is a fake word, it's not a good, it's not an appropriate word. And yet, despite the branding issues, there were still so much promise here. So many things that could be made better through the sheer power of supercomputing. Well, this week ABC's Jacqueline Lee, who's based in California, got a The front row seat to how this technology is revolutionizing the fight against wildfires. Spring and Jacqueline now who reported on this for ABC News Live Prime, Jacqueline? What is happening here? What's so new? Hey Brad, so it's really cool because AI is transforming the fire fight. They're using technology across the board, whether it's cameras, whether it's satellites, whether it's drones to attack these fires the second they emerge. And this long term is actually going to help not only reaction times, but help save lives. For us, it boils down to a few simple things, enhance safety of our employees, quicker response times, which means it's safer for the public and reduces the threat of any exposure that we're experiencing throughout the state. There are more than 1300, 360 degree cameras across California. It's powered by alert California, they've partnered with Microsoft and now Microsoft is providing the AI technology to notice a change to process the data from these cameras and detect when a wildfire is emerging. So think of like there's six different photos and the AI technology will identify if there's a difference in one of those photos. The AI will then take those coordinates, send it to a dispatch center operated by Cal fire and then an actual human will then look at the change and identify is this smoke? Do we need to send a crew out here to address this fire before it becomes even bigger? Cal fires are becoming more prevalent across the United States and especially here in California. The ability to leverage technology and artificial intelligence is extremely important. I think the big difference here, Brad, is the sheer volume of data that the AI is sorting through. So if it would take a normal human years to sort through this data, it takes AI minutes. You have 9 million frames in just one day, so it will take a human to look at every one of these frames over 10 years. This is directly impacting how quickly firefighters can address a growing fire. We got the 360 degree cameras down on the ground, like the remote cameras. How much is like, is there like an eye in the sky kind of an option for this and how does that work? For the first time, this nonprofit called Earth Fire Alliance actually put up three satellites in outer space to then circle the globe multiple times. And send that to appropriate agencies that has never happened before. The satellites that we launched are about the size of me and they're designed to observe fires and they pass over the Earth every 90 minutes. We talked to Brian Collins from Earth Fire Alliance who described these satellite launches. So as they fly over and it moves across and scans across the, across the United States. SpaceX put up the satellites. This is getting backing from the Bezos Earth Fund. This is getting backing from Google. I mean, this is a big deal. And so for satellites to be able to go around the world and pick up whether or not there's a fire and then transmit that data to firefighters on the ground, that is a game changer. For the first time this summer, there's now a drone strike team that went up in Aspen. And there are these AI drones that are operated by a human pilot and they are helping firefighters access fires that humans would not be able to access. We can detect it early, if we can keep it out of the canopy or it's a manageable flame length, and we can get these semi-autonomous aircraft there within minutes where it would now take us hours, that can have a huge impact. These drones are throwing water, foam, all the works. And yet, Jack, it's so funny that this does feel like a moment where everyone's suspicious of AI. So I mean, is there reason to be skeptical, concerned here? How did you walk away from this? So I mean, my big thing is I feel like lately, AI has been a lot of doom and gloom, which is valid, concerns about safety, concerns about privacy. But I have to say, there's a whole sector of AI that is truly changing the world. I left a lot of these interviews genuinely feeling inspired at how this technology is truly helping people and helping animals and helping the planet. And I think that is something that needs to be highlighted as well. And this is the tone that I think a lot of early adopters of AI, a lot of these engineers have walked away from job interviews like this as well. And yet, we have seen, like, just with the sheer power of all the computing here, that there are concerns to be had. But we'll see how this sort of shapes at least this small corner of the human experience. Jacqueline Lee in California now. Thank you. Thanks, Brad. All right. One more quick break. When we come back, these candidates are a little wacky, but the effect they're having is no joke. 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Visit avicadogreen mattress.com to find a store near you that's avicadogreen mattress.com. Avicadogreen mattress.com Welcome to the greatest show on the effects of the HS 13. What do you sense? Harder. Harder. The star-studded cast returns. Something wicked this way comes. You all got to unite. I'll drink to that. If you're going to rise up and rule the world, you better get yourself a damn sense of a humor. And one last thing. This Sunday is election day in Brazil. And this is a huge one. President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, known as Lula, is seeking reelection yet again, and he's running against another familiar name, Bolsonaro. This time though, it's the son of the disgraced Jair Bolsonaro, he's currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. And yet some other candidates are even more noteworthy. This is Plenio Trump. No, he's not related to Donald Trump. His real name isn't even Trump at all. But he is a Trump impersonator, and that is the name he's running with in a real live congressional race. See, here in the States, we have joke candidates and protest candidates. I once covered a guy in New Hampshire who goes by vermin supreme, he pays all the filing fees to officially run for president, and go to candidate events with a boot on his head. In the UK parliamentary elections, there was a guy running against Nigel Farage named Count Binface, because he wears a trashcan on his face. But you gotta believe me when I say Brazil's joke candidates are on another level. On TikTok, this cab driver calls himself the taxi samurai, he's practicing his nunchucks on Sunday though, he'll be on the ballot for his state legislature. A man named Walsi Calisto Viera is running under the name Mick Jagger, another candidate is just calling herself tsunami grandmother, and there was a grand tradition of this in Brazil going back decades, back in the 80s, a guy named Anias would buy quick 15 second chunks of TV airtime and punctuate them all by saying his name and his candidacy number 56. He eventually racked up 360,000 votes, this year there are hundreds of other characters like this running for office, and maybe this shouldn't be surprising, right? Sometimes voters don't like any of their choices. These fringe candidates can be a way to express your dissatisfaction with the system. What is surprising to me though is in Brazil, establishment political parties will actually court these candidates. See in the US, taxi samurai might run as an independent candidate. In Brazil though, you got to belong to a party, but those parties will come up to you and say, "Hey, Mr. Samurai, we don't have a candidate running in this district, you should run under our name." What's in it for the parties though? Well, in a parliamentary system like Brazil, even if your candidate doesn't win, their votes still count toward your nationwide party total. The more votes you get overall, the more public funding you can get for the next election. Of course that also means, if you are a candidate with the platform to take down the system, you might be inadvertently helping political parties become more entrenched than ever. I actually had the honor of moderating a tea-span debate for it, they called it the lesser-known candidates' debate in New Hampshire one year, like one of my favorite pieces of American democracy ever. Now I'm like, "Wow, we got to up the ante like Brazil does." Start here is produced by Jen Newman, Anthony Ali, Aaron Ferrer, Emily Schutz, and Vika Aronson. Ariel Chester is our social media producer, Josh Cohanis Director of Podcasts Programming. I'm our managing editor. Thanks to John Newman, Tara Gimble, Amy McNiff, and Katie Dandas, special thanks this week to Elizabeth Thomas and Indra De La Psychon. I'm Brad Milky. I'll see you next week. Bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye-bye. "Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest." "Nothing bonds a family together, quite like mortal jeopardy." "Streaming October 14th. Only on Disney+. On October 19th, 2025, The Louvre became the backdrop of something straight out of a Heist movie. In this series, I'll take you inside the events of that day through the eyes of the people who lived them. Then, I'll join the International Hunt for The Louvre Jewels. Heist at the Louvre, a new series from ABC Audio. 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