Reverb × Civicus | CherryCoBiz

Content note: This essay discusses murder, a failed execution, capital punishment, mass shootings, and footage of violent deaths. Please read with care.

I have spent a considerable portion of my life trying to understand human behavior. Why we do what we do. Why we believe what we believe. How our experiences shape the people we become, and how differently we can interpret the same world.

Sometimes that curiosity takes me somewhere uncomfortable.

Recently, it brought me back to the story of Christa Pike, a woman sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a young woman attending Job Corps in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I remembered the case, although I had forgotten much of what happened. I knew Pike had murdered someone. I knew she had received the death penalty. What I didn’t remember was the extent of the brutality.

With news of Pike’s approaching execution, I initially felt somewhat removed from it. Another headline. Another death sentence. Another terrible crime from years ago.

Then her execution failed.

On September 30, 2026, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute her by lethal injection. After two doses of pentobarbital, she remained alive. Witnesses described her struggling and still breathing for nearly an hour after the first injection.

She was transported to a hospital, where she received lifesaving treatment. She has since been returned to prison. The failed execution has prompted an investigation into what happened and renewed questions about the state’s lethal injection procedures.

And suddenly, I found myself asking questions I hadn’t expected to ask.

Not simply whether Christa Pike deserved to die, but what it means when a government decides someone must die, attempts to carry out that decision, and fails.

What happens next? Do we try again? Does the suffering she experienced count for anything? If our laws prohibit cruel and unusual punishment, what happens when the method intended to be humane becomes something else entirely?

I went back and watched A Case Almost Too Gruesome to Mention: Christa Pike by Explore With Us.

I wanted to remember what happened.

What I found myself thinking about afterward was Colleen.

The Life That Never Got to Unfold

I went to Job Corps, too.

Not the same facility. Not at the same time. But I know what it means to discover an opportunity you didn’t know existed.

For me, Job Corps was a doorway.

I was a young mother who wanted to do better and be better for my son. I wanted education, opportunity, and a future that might look different from the one I was living.

Everyone who arrives at Job Corps has a story. I cannot speak for all of them, and I don’t know precisely what brought Colleen there.

But I know what that doorway represented to me.

And I remember something else.

At my second Job Corps location, I once went into the woods with three other young people to smoke marijuana. We were friends, spending time together, doing something that felt ordinary to us.

There were four of us.

And all four of us came back.

Colleen went into the woods with three other young people, too. According to the court record, she was taken there by people who would participate in the events leading to her death.

She never came back.

I have thought about that similarity more than once.

Not because our experiences were the same. They weren’t. But because I remember how little thought I gave to the possibility that an ordinary decision could become my last.

I returned to my life.

I continued raising children, pursuing education, exploring different professions, making mistakes, learning from them, changing my mind, and discovering opportunities I couldn’t have imagined when I was young.

Today, at fifty, I am still becoming.

Colleen never had that chance.

She was nineteen years old.

I don’t know what she might have accomplished, whom she might have loved, what she might have learned, or how she might have changed.

Perhaps she would have done remarkable things. Perhaps she would have lived a quiet, ordinary life.

Either would have been hers.

And that is part of what murder steals.

Not simply the years someone might have lived, but every possibility contained within them.

I cannot begin to imagine what her family has endured. To know the circumstances of her death, to carry that knowledge for more than thirty years, and then to face yet another unprecedented turn in the punishment of the person responsible.

I can imagine anger, confusion, helplessness, and grief. But imagining isn’t knowing.

I have not experienced that particular loss.

And I don’t believe I have the right to tell Colleen’s family what justice or closure should mean to them.

When Punishment Becomes Another Question

Revisiting Colleen’s murder complicated my feelings about Christa Pike.

The crime was brutal. The suffering inflicted on Colleen was prolonged. The court record describes deliberate acts of violence that are difficult to comprehend.

And I found myself thinking something uncomfortable.

Perhaps what Pike experienced during the failed execution was karma.

I don’t know whether I believe in karma as some governing force of the universe. But I understand the human impulse to look at suffering and wonder whether there is some moral symmetry in it.

Someone who inflicted terrible suffering experienced suffering herself.

And part of me recognized that symmetry.

But another part of me questioned what I was doing by finding it fitting.

Was I considering justice? Retribution? Revenge?

Where does one end and another begin?

Tennessee had already paused executions in 2022 after an investigation uncovered problems with its lethal injection procedures. Executions eventually resumed, but on May 21, 2026, the state failed to carry out the execution of Tony Carruthers after execution personnel were unable to establish the required intravenous access. Pike’s failed execution in September was the second in Tennessee this year, raising troubling questions about whether the state had adequately addressed its earlier failures.

After Pike’s failed attempt, Governor Bill Lee paused the remaining executions scheduled in Tennessee for the year and ordered a third-party review of what went wrong.

Subsequent reporting revealed another troubling failure. Emergency dispatch recordings showed that confusion over whether a call for help from the execution chamber was legitimate delayed medical assistance after Pike survived the injections, raising further questions about the state’s preparedness for an execution that did not go as planned.

The very system authorized to end her life became responsible for preserving it.

I could not stop thinking about that.

We have laws intended to prevent cruel and unusual punishment. We have procedures intended to make executions controlled and humane. Yet when those procedures fail, we are confronted with the physical reality of what the state is attempting to do.

End a human life.

And then, when the attempt fails, perhaps attempt it again.

I haven’t resolved how I feel about that.

I understand why people believe certain crimes warrant the ultimate punishment. I also understand why others believe the government should never possess that authority.

What I cannot ignore is the contradiction I feel when a society claims to value human life while deliberately arranging for one to end.

That contradiction doesn’t erase Colleen’s murder.

It doesn’t excuse Pike.

It simply remains.

When Death Becomes Theater

While I was thinking about Pike, another execution entered the national conversation.

Nidal Hasan.

In November 2009, Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty-two others.

I remember that day for reasons beyond the news coverage.

I was working as an emergency medical dispatcher with Air Evac Lifeteam. I took a call from the military as our team helped coordinate aircraft responding to the emergency.

I stayed on that phone with military personnel at the heart of the chaos, while television coverage of the same event played nearby.

I learned something that day I have never forgotten. A broadcast and a crisis are not the same thing. On one side of the room was the urgency of real people needing help. On the other was a nation watching it unfold from a distance.

I have written about that day before, in More Than a Number: My Personal Connection to a National Tragedy.

Last year, I also wrote about Hasan’s death sentence in Fort Hood, Death Penalty, and the Performance of Power. I argued then that military executions are political theater by default, and that justice risked being reduced to a prop.

I did not expect anyone to propose an actual audience.

In October 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth supported making Hasan’s execution by firing squad public, and the Pentagon confirmed plans for a livestream.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

A government proposing to broadcast a human being’s execution.

Hasan has been paralyzed from the waist down since officers shot him during the attack.

I thought about the videos extremist organizations have circulated of hostages being murdered. I never watched those videos, but I knew people who had.

The circumstances are fundamentally different. A terrorist murder and a lawful execution following a criminal conviction are not interchangeable events.

But both raise questions about the deliberate presentation of death to an audience.

What purpose does that presentation serve?

Who benefits from watching?

And when does witnessing punishment become consuming violence?

I began calling it death theater.

On October 15, President Trump announced that Hasan’s execution would not be livestreamed. The execution remains scheduled for December 3, subject to legal developments, and immediate family members of the victims may attend in person if they choose.

The plan had drawn criticism from both political parties. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll of more than 2,500 American adults, conducted October 9–13, found that while about half supported Hasan’s execution by firing squad, eight in ten opposed livestreaming it.

I can’t know everything that influenced the President’s decision. A White House official said one factor was learning that Hasan is paralyzed. But even some lawmakers who supported his execution opposed broadcasting it. Supporting an execution and supporting its public exhibition are not the same thing.

The reversal matters.

But so does the fact that the proposal existed.

I am not arguing that Hasan’s victims should be forgotten or that his crimes should go unanswered.

I am asking why a government would consider making an execution a public event for potentially millions of viewers.

The families of those murdered deserve dignity and consideration.

The people who survived deserve to have their experiences recognized.

And the public deserves to ask whether broadcasting death serves justice or transforms punishment into spectacle.

What Happens When We Keep Watching?

The livestream was called off.

But I had to admit something uncomfortable. We don’t need a government to broadcast death for us to see it.

We already watch.

I’ve seen footage of Charlie Kirk being shot.

I remember the shock of watching a human life end in a moment of violence.

I’ve also seen footage surrounding the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, including the death of the young man who fired at him.

Then there was the killing of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson, another death that quickly became part of a much larger public argument.

And in Minneapolis this January, bystanders recorded federal agents shooting and killing two American citizens. Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent on January 7. Alex Pretti was shot by Border Patrol agents later that month. The circumstances of both shootings have been the subject of public dispute.

One government proposal to broadcast a lawful execution was withdrawn. Other deaths involving federal agents were recorded anyway, by ordinary people holding up their phones.

Those recordings are not the same thing.

A broadcast arranged by the state displays punishment on the state’s own terms. A bystander’s video may provide an independent record of what happened, evidence that can be examined rather than relying solely on an official account.

That distinction matters.

And the question of why a recording exists, and who it was made for, took me back to something I watched many years ago.

Faces of Death and the Curiosity of Watching

I remember watching Faces of Death years and years ago.

The original 1978 film, directed by John Alan Schwartz under a pseudonym, became notorious for its collection of disturbing footage involving death, accidents, executions, and other violent or unsettling events.

Some of the footage was authentic. Other sequences were staged or dramatized, in ways that made it difficult to distinguish reality from fabrication. In the VHS era, copies were passed from hand to hand, along with stories about what people had seen.

I watched it.

Not because I found suffering entertaining.

It was morbid curiosity.

I wanted to see something I didn’t understand, something disturbing and largely removed from ordinary experience.

Looking back, I think that distinction deserves consideration.

Human beings are curious about death. We know it awaits every one of us, yet there is so much about it we cannot fully understand.

Sometimes curiosity draws us toward things that frighten us.

But curiosity doesn’t automatically make an experience educational, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the material was created or distributed for a worthwhile purpose.

Faces of Death was packaged and sold around the fascination of witnessing death. Even the uncertainty over which scenes were real became part of its appeal. Perhaps that ambiguity let viewers keep a little emotional distance from what they were seeing.

What interests me now is how much the world has changed since I first encountered that film.

There was a time when people had to seek out a VHS tape to see something so disturbing.

Today, we can encounter comparable imagery while scrolling through an ordinary social media feed.

We may not even be looking for it.

A video can travel around the world before the people closest to the victim have had time to process what happened. It can be replayed, edited, argued over, turned into a meme, or stripped of the context that made it meaningful in the first place.

And somewhere in that process, a person’s final moments can become content.

I don’t think everyone who watches such footage is motivated by cruelty. Some people are trying to understand. Others are documenting wrongdoing, studying history, or attempting to make sense of something that has shaken them.

I know that my own curiosity has taken me into uncomfortable territory.

But the intention of the viewer is only part of the ethical question.

Why was the footage made available?

How was it presented?

Was it shared to inform, document, warn, educate, provoke, profit, or entertain?

And what responsibility do we have once we’ve seen it?

Curiosity may explain why we look.

It doesn’t necessarily explain why someone chose to show us.

When Witnessing Becomes Consumption

Kirk. Thompson. Good. Pretti. A young man on a rooftop in Butler.

Different people. Different circumstances. Different motivations.

And yet, again and again, we watch human beings die or encounter the images left behind.

We discuss them.

We argue about them.

We interpret them through politics, ideology, anger, and personal experience.

Sometimes the person who died nearly disappears beneath the debate about what their death represents.

I wonder what all this exposure does to us.

Psychology offers several possible ways to examine that question, including desensitization, emotional exhaustion, and moral disengagement.

Repeated exposure to violent imagery can affect how people respond emotionally, although the effects are not identical for everyone.

Becoming less visibly shocked doesn’t necessarily mean someone has stopped caring.

And witnessing violence can sometimes motivate people to demand accountability, support victims, or challenge official explanations.

But I worry about how easily human suffering can become another piece of content.

Another video.

Another argument.

Another opportunity to declare whose life mattered and whose didn’t.

And then we scroll onward.

We are living in a world where technology allows us to witness suffering from almost anywhere.

But access to suffering is not the same as understanding it. I learned that on a dispatch line in 2009.

And watching someone die is not necessarily the same as honoring the life they lived.

Animals Walking In and Out of Rooms

If watching someone die is not the same as honoring their life, then I had to ask myself what a life actually is, once you strip away the headlines and the arguments.

The answer that came to me was surprisingly simple. Somewhere along the way, I had heard human beings described as little more than animals walking in and out of rooms.

It sounds almost absurd at first. But I find something meaningful in the simplicity.

Look at the planet we inhabit. The astonishing diversity of animals, birds, insects, and other living creatures, each navigating the world in its own way.

And then there are human beings.

Thinking, feeling, learning, loving, fearing, competing, protecting, and sometimes destroying.

We have constructed complicated systems of government, religion, justice, punishment, and morality. We have built powerful technologies and accumulated generations of knowledge.

Yet beneath those accomplishments, we remain living creatures sharing a temporary existence on a remarkable planet.

Life is constantly beginning and ending.

And somehow, knowing that every life must end doesn’t make the individual life any less precious.

At least not to me.

I have always said that I love to live and live to love.

That philosophy has accompanied me through many different chapters of my life.

And my relationship with death has changed considerably along the way.

Living Beyond a Predicted Ending

When I was thirteen, a psychic told me I would die at thirty-six.

I carried that prediction for twenty-three years.

It influenced how I thought about my future, what I feared, and what I hoped I might live long enough to experience.

For years, I wanted nothing more than to see my eldest son’s eighteenth birthday.

Then, when I was thirty-four, I had another son.

Suddenly, I found myself asking for more time.

Another eighteen years.

Enough to see this child grow up, too.

When I turned thirty-seven, I believed God had answered my prayers.

That was how I understood the world then.

My beliefs have changed since. I’m no longer religious in the way I once was. Years of experience, education, observation, and questioning have changed how I interpret many things.

But I remember the person I was.

I remember what it meant to fear an ending that someone had convinced me was approaching.

And now, at fifty, I have a different relationship with mortality.

I don’t particularly want to die.

I love living this life experience.

But I also find a strange comfort in accepting that my life will eventually end.

Perhaps that acceptance has made me more aware of how remarkable it is to be here at all.

And perhaps that’s part of why these conversations about punishment, murder, and state-sanctioned death trouble me.

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to understand what it means to live.

I cannot separate that curiosity from what it means to die.

What Do We Actually Want From Justice?

I understand the desire for accountability.

When someone commits a horrific crime, there must be consequences.

I also understand that some people believe those consequences should include death.

But I find myself wondering what happens when death itself is considered insufficient.

I’ve heard people respond to proposed executions by saying that the punishment isn’t enough.

Not enough suffering.

Not enough fear.

Not enough pain.

And I wonder what that tells us about our relationship with justice.

Are we trying to restore moral order?

Are we trying to protect society?

Are we seeking relief from grief?

Or are we sometimes asking punishment to accomplish something it cannot possibly do?

When the President called off the livestream, he said the families of Hasan’s victims could still watch in person. I understand why witnessing the sentence being carried out might matter to some families. I also wonder what witnessing can give them, and what it cannot.

Nothing will bring Colleen Slemmer back.

Nothing will restore the lives lost at Fort Hood.

Nothing will return the years that families and survivors have spent living with the consequences of violence.

A punishment may satisfy the requirements of law. It may provide a sense of accountability or relief to some people. Others may experience it differently.

I cannot speak for them.

But I can question what happens when the government turns that punishment into a public performance.

I can question what repeated exposure to violence does to our collective empathy.

And I can question whether our commitment to human dignity should depend entirely on whether we approve of the human being in question.

These aren’t easy questions.

They shouldn’t be.

The Value of a Life

I began this reflection because a woman survived an execution that was intended to kill her.

I went looking for the story behind her sentence.

And I found myself thinking about another young woman who never had the chance to grow older.

Colleen Slemmer.

Nineteen years old.

A student at Job Corps.

Someone whose future was still unfolding.

I think about the young mother I was when I attended Job Corps, and all the things I couldn’t have imagined were waiting for me.

The education. The work. The people. The mistakes. The lessons. The children growing older. The changes in what I believe.

The extraordinary privilege of continuing to become.

Colleen was denied that.

Her family was denied the years they might have shared with her.

And no matter what happens to Christa Pike, that loss remains.

I don’t know that I will ever arrive at a perfectly settled position on capital punishment.

But I do know that I don’t want to live in a society that turns executions into entertainment.

I don’t want the deaths of victims reduced to political opportunities.

And I don’t want our familiarity with violence to make us forget what violence actually takes from the world.

A human life is not merely a number, a headline, a criminal case, or a political argument.

It is an entire existence.

One that can never be repeated in precisely the same way.

We are all standing somewhere, looking at these questions through the experiences that have shaped us.

And perhaps the most important thing we can do is remember that the people we’re discussing were standing somewhere, too.

Some were given the opportunity to keep walking.

Others weren’t.

Before there was a death sentence to debate, there was a life that should never have been taken.