The doctor who oversaw Christa Pike’s botched execution compared himself to Jesus, still wants her to be put to death and said in his first public comments since the fiasco that he was prepared to finish the job himself.
Dr. Mark Fowler, a 69-year-old grandfather and Bible school teacher studying at the seminary, said he believed Pike deserved to die for the brutal torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995, he told New York Magazine.
For two reasons. First, because it would bring “a sense of justice” to his victim’s mother, who was present during the attempted execution.
And second, because he has “no doubt” in his mind that the inmates he personally helped put to death deserved their punishment.
“There are times when you have to draw the line and say: “You have transgressed socially acceptable norms and we must extract the ultimate punishment from you,” Fowler told the outlet.
Fowler, whose role during Pike’s execution was to wait in the anteroom of a death chamber and then pronounce him dead, has participated in seven executions at $3,000 a job – and believes that carrying out the death penalty is a moral obligation.
“How can you morally say, ‘I’m for the death penalty as long as someone else does the job?’ “, he said. “I do things that no one wants to do.”
On Sept. 30, Fowler was waiting when prison officials called him to the death chamber where Pike was still breathing after two doses of the deadly drug pentobarbital.
He said he knew something was wrong because 45 minutes had passed since the procedure began, which usually takes about 10 minutes.
“She’s not dead,” the guard told him.
Here’s the latest on the botched execution of Tennessee murderer Christa Pike:
Fowler believed it was only a matter of time before she succumbed to drugs. He gave him another half hour.
But by that time, 50-year-old Pike remained in a coma, the deputy commissioner ordered the execution stopped, and Fowler was forced to arrange emergency care to save her life.
Investigators later determined that Pike’s IV lines had been placed incorrectly and that the drugs were seeping into the tissue in his arms instead of entering his bloodstream.
In less than two weeks, she was walking and talking and was back in prison at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
State Governor Bill Lee has suspended executions for the remainder 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 their situation, but they didn’t,” he said.
He now wants Tennessee to consider returning to a three-drug execution cocktail that includes potassium chloride, despite concerns that it would be a painful path to follow.
But Fowler doesn’t consider himself a bad guy.
“I am not a mean and vicious person. I am not unscrupulous. I am not indifferent and I am not incompetent,” he insisted.
Due to the harsh criticism he received over the mistake in prison, he closed his Facebook account and accused bullies of trying to make him back down and resign.
“They thought if they could humiliate me, I would opt out — because I promise you, no one else in Tennessee is going to sign up now,” he said.
Calling criticism of him “slander,” 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 October 30, in her first statement since the prison disaster, she wrote: “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what’s next… Some days finding hope is harder than others. For now, I’m trying to heal, one day at a time.”
Fowler takes a darker view of the issue.
“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he said.
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