In November 2022, Murray Hooper lay strapped to a gurney in Arizona while an execution team spent more than 20 minutes trying, and failing, to get IVs into his arms. Eventually the team gave up on his arms and went in through his groin. Hooper turned to the witness room and asked, "Can you believe this?"

The man responsible for that execution was Frank Strada, then deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry. When it was over, he walked out and announced Hooper's death.

On Saturday, Strada resigned as Tennessee's Commissioner of Correction. Three days earlier, his team had given convicted murderer Christa Pike two full doses of pentobarbital, and she lived through both.

Pike, now 50, is unconscious on a ventilator in a hospital. She was supposed to be the first woman Tennessee executed in more than 200 years. Gov. Bill Lee has postponed every remaining execution scheduled for 2026 and hired former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to conduct an independent review.

Strada's resignation statement said the department "carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol," and that "stepping aside is in the best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward."

You can believe one of those or the other. If the protocol was followed and a condemned killer survived two doses, the protocol is broken. If it wasn't followed, his department botched the one job that mattered.

His record suggests the problem was never the paperwork.

Strada spent three years in Arizona as deputy director of corrections, from 2020 to 2023, running prison operations and serving as the public face of the state's executions. Arizona resumed executions in 2022 after nearly eight years, and carried out three that year.

Clarence Dixon, May 11: about 40 minutes of jabbing his arms for a vein. Witnesses said the executioners' hands were shaking, and they finally cut a line into his groin.

Frank Atwood, June 8: the team couldn't find a usable vein in his arm and ended up going in through his hand.

Murray Hooper, November 16: more than 20 minutes, failed IVs in both arms, then the groin. "Can you believe this?"

All three had the same problem. Strada's teams couldn't reliably get a needle into a vein.

When Arizona's next corrections director, Ryan Thornell, went through the records, he found documentation that was "severely lacking," execution drugs kept in unlabeled jars, and staff with "inadequate knowledge and expertise." On Strada's communications with the pharmacist, the finding was blunt: he "didn't record anything." A separate review by a retired federal magistrate found that execution staff had looked up lethal injection dosages on Wikipedia.

Tennessee hired him to run its prisons in January 2023.

The state had just paused all executions after calling off Oscar Smith's execution in 2022, when it came out that the drugs hadn't been properly tested. Strada arrived as part of the cleanup. Federal defenders now say Tennessee's 2025 execution protocol borrowed language straight from the 2022 Arizona protocol that Arizona has since worked to correct.

On May 21 of this year, Strada's team tried to execute Tony Carruthers, condemned for the 1994 murders of Marcellos Anderson, Anderson's mother Delois, and Frederick Tucker. The team got a primary IV line in. Then it spent more than an hour failing to establish the required backup line, including a botched attempt at a central line. The execution was called off, and Carruthers left the room with a one-year reprieve.

Four months later came Christa Pike. Witnesses and her attorneys say the team went through at least seven needles over the course of an hour. Five minutes after the second dose, she was still breathing. Around 9:15 p.m., an ambulance and a fire truck pulled up to the prison.

So in five years, Strada has had a hand in five executions across two states, and every one ran into trouble getting the drugs into a vein. In two of them, the condemned prisoner left the room alive.

It's worth remembering who survived this one.

In January 1995, Pike and two other students at the Knoxville Job Corps Center lured their 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer to a secluded spot. For nearly an hour they beat her, cut her and gagged her. Pike's 17-year-old boyfriend carved pentagrams into Slemmer's chest and face. Pike crushed Slemmer's skull with a chunk of broken asphalt, then pried out a piece of it and kept it as a trophy to show friends.

Pike was 18. Her boyfriend's age kept him off death row. Pike got the death sentence and then spent 31 years on death row while every appeal, challenge and procedural delay the system offers ran its course.

Former Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith, who worked the original case, put it plainly: Pike "represents pure evil." That's the judgment of a man who saw the crime scene.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is running for governor, was just as direct. "This situation is tragic. Christa Pike should have been executed long ago," she said. "While there should be a thorough review of what happened and why the process failed, the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly. As your governor, I will do just that."

Anti-death-penalty activists are already calling Pike's survival proof that capital punishment can't work. The record points somewhere else. A jury handed down the sentence. Courts upheld it for three decades. The failure came at the very end, in an execution room run by a man whose last state had already documented that its teams couldn't find a vein.

Tennessee taxpayers spent 31 years housing, feeding and paying for medical care for the woman who kept a piece of Colleen Slemmer's skull. Now Pike is in a hospital bed on the state's dime, and every family waiting on another Tennessee execution has been pushed further back in line.

Strada's last official words were that his department followed "the established protocol."

On his record, that may be the most accurate thing he said.