Before she became
infamous as one of the youngest American women ever sentenced to die, Christa Gail Pike was a North Carolina teenager who broke into a community center to steal some candy. At 5-foot-3, with thick auburn curls, she’d been in trouble at home and in school but not with the law. A juvenile court judge put Pike on probation, but she ran afoul of the rules. In the fall of 1991, when she was 15, Pike was sent to the Juvenile Evaluation Center in Swannanoa. She arrived just before Thanksgiving.
Nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, just minutes away from Asheville, the center first opened in the 1960s as a “haven for troubled children,” in the words of the press. It was supposed to be an alternative to more severe “training schools,” but by the 1990s was skewed toward punishment. According to former staff, progress was measured in points, which were added or subtracted according to a child’s behavior. Infractions ranged from having “contraband” — including pencils or pens, which were allowable only in sanctioned study areas — to running away.
The system didn’t work for Pike. “She was not following the rules or she was doing something to sabotage herself,” one social worker would later testify at a hearing in Pike’s case. Although her violations weren’t generally serious, they did keep her stuck in place. Most kids stayed at the center for a few months; Pike stayed for well over a year.
It seemed possible that Pike might not actually want to go home. From the time she was a little girl, she’d been hurt and neglected by the adults who were supposed to protect her. Months before arriving in Swannanoa, Pike had been temporarily removed from her home by the state’s social services agency, which found that her mother’s live-in boyfriend was physically and sexually abusing her. Shortly afterward, Pike wrote a letter to her best friend saying she wanted to kill herself. Among a list of reasons, she wrote that she’d been raped by a different man, a neighbor
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