The doctor who oversaw Christa Pike’s botched execution compared himself to Jesus, still wants her put to death, and said in his first public comments since the fiasco that he’s willing to finish the job himself.
Dr. Mark Fowler, a 69-year-old grandfather and Bible school teacher studying at seminary, said he believes Pike deserves to die for the brutal 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, he told New York Magazine.
For two reasons. One, because it would bring “a sense of justice” to her victim’s mother, who was present at the execution attempt.
And two, because he there’s “no doubt” in his mind that the inmates he has personally helped put to death deserved their punishment.
“There are times when you have to draw a line and say, ‘You have traversed socially acceptable norms and we must extract from you the ultimate penalty,” Fowler told the news outlet.
Fowler, whose role during Pike’s execution was to wait in a death chamber anteroom and then pronounce her dead, has taken part in seven executions at $3,000 a job — and believes carrying out the death sentence is a moral obligation.
“How can you morally say, ‘I’m for the death penalty so long as someone else does the work?’” he said. “I do things that nobody wants to do.”
On Sept. 30, Fowler was waiting when prison officials called him into the death chamber where Pike was still breathing after two doses of the lethal drug phenobarbital.
He said he knew something was wrong because it had been 45 minutes since the start of the procedure, which usually takes about 10 minutes.
“She’s not dead,” the warden told him.
Fowler thought it was just a matter of time until she succumbed to the drug. He gave it another half hour.
But at that point, Pike, 50, remained comatose, the deputy commissioner ordered the execution to stop, and Fowler was forced to arrange emergency treatment to save her life.
Investigators later determined that Pike’s IV lines had been improperly placed and caused the drugs to seep into the tissue in her arms instead of entering her bloodstream.
In less than two weeks, she was walking and talking and back in prison at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
The state’s governor, Bill Lee, suspended executions for the rest of 2026, while Pike’s lawyers try to prevent another lethal injection.
Fowler admitted mistakes were made, saying staff should have responded when Pike complained of arm pain.
“They should have stopped and reassessed, and they didn’t,” he said.
Now he wants Tennessee to consider returning to a three-drug execution cocktail that includes potassium chloride, despite concerns that it’s a painful way to go.
But Fowler doesn’t see himself as a bad guy.
“I’m not an evil, vicious person. I’m not unscrupulous. I’m not uncaring, and I’m not incompetent,” he insisted.
Because of the fever-pitched criticism he’s received over the prison blunder, he’s shut down his Facebook account and accused bullies of trying to make him back down and quit.
“They felt that if they could humiliate me I would step back from it — because I promise you, there ain’t anybody else in Tennessee going to sign up for it now,” he said.
Describing the criticism against him as a “calumny,” he said, “People said bad things about Jesus, didn’t they?”
Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
On Oct. 30, in her first statement since the prison catastrophe, she wrote, “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next … Some days, finding hope is harder than others. For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time.”
Fowler has a darker take on the matter.
“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he said.
