“My heart breaks every single day because I keep reliving it and reliving it, and I can’t no more, and I want this to happen before I die,” she added.
“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was. I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting.”
The Justice Coalition, a victims’ rights advocacy group, has raised money to help Martinez travel to Tennessee to watch the execution.
The group’s executive director, Robert Bracewell, said this sentence was determined by a jury of Pike’s peers and it is what Colleen’s family want.
“We stand firm with the family that on the 30 September her execution ought to proceed.”
Ashlee Sellars grapples with two seemingly conflicting beliefs: that Colleen’s mother has a right to feel justice has been served and that everyone, including her friend Christa, deserves a chance at redemption.
“When I think about reconciling who you see on TV or the horrible tragedy that happened with Colleen, the only thing that makes sense to me is around mental health and trauma and the way that people process stuff in a moment when they don’t have the things that they need,” Sellars says.
“These horrible things happen in your youth and then those traumas moved through you, in our community, and you cause harm to somebody else.”
Sellars met Pike in prison while serving a 25-year sentence for her involvement in a robbery-murder. They spoke to each other through the meal flaps in their doors on the high security unit. Now, Sellars works as an advocate for justice reform and victims of crime.
“People want to know that everyone’s life matters, right? They want to know that Colleen’s life mattered,” she says.
“Christa in this moment, I think she is fighting much more for her life to matter than she is to actually live.”
