14-year-old girl who shot her mother in the face laughs before verdict

A schoolgirl killer on trial for shooting her mother in the face when she was 14 shocked courtroom spectators with stifled giggles.

Carly Gregg calmly hid a .357 Magnum pistol behind her back before shooting her mother, math teacher Ashley Smylie, three times.

A horrified court heard she then cruelly used her late mother's mobile phone to lure her stepfather, 39-year-old Heath Smylie, by texting: “Are you home soon darling?”

When he opened the kitchen door at her home in Brandon, Mississippi, she shot him too, but he survived and snatched the gun from her before she fled.

Gregg, now 15, is being held in solitary confinement. She admits to killing her mother and wounding her stepfather, but denies first-degree murder, attempted murder and tampering with evidence.

She even got into a fit of giggles when one of her lawyers wrote a note on a piece of paper next to her in the courtroom. Live footage of the trial, with no sound, showed her smiling before covering her mouth with her hand to stifle her reaction.

Defense attorney Bridget Todd told Rankin District Court in Mississippi that there were three victims on the day of the shooting – not just Mr. and Mrs. Smylie, but also Gregg himself. She added: “She loved her mother.”

Instead of accepting the offer to plead guilty and receive 40 years, Gregg risked life without parole and pleaded insanity because she could not remember the March killing.

The court has heard allegations that she was reading the 19th-century novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky at the time of the shooting.

The antihero, the student Raskolnikov, is convinced that he can murder and rob an elderly pawnbroker because this will enable him to do great things as an “extraordinary” person. He is declared insane and is sentenced to eight years in a labor camp.

On the day of the murder, Gregg's mother drove the straight-A student to Northwest Rankin High School, where Mrs. Smylie had been the best teacher of the year.

But prosecutor Katheryn Newman said revelations about Gregg's “secret life” – he used e-cigarettes to consume marijuana, had a boyfriend and used secret cell phones to text late into the night – led to murder.

Friends said she started using marijuana six weeks ago, four times a week, and had also experimented with cocaine and magic mushrooms.

They had dismissed it as teenage babble and said that she “hated her mother” and would “kill her”.

Gregg, whose social media account was titled “Horrible War Crimes,” had gotten into an argument with a friend at school that day and was so worried that he texted Mrs. Smylie and told her what her daughter was planning.

Ms. Newman said that minutes after Ms. Smylie drove her daughter home at 3:30 p.m., she went into Gregg's bedroom to confiscate her marijuana vaporizers.

Surveillance video from the family kitchen shows Gregg leaving the room, apparently to retrieve the Magnum from under her mother's bed, before walking past the camera again, her hand and presumably the gun hidden behind her back.

Moments later, gunshots and a scream ring out as Gregg walks into her room and shoots her mother twice in the face and once in the neck.

She then invited a friend over and, after asking, “Are you afraid of dead bodies?”, showed her her mother's fresh corpse. The friend, known only as BW, said Gregg told her, “I put three in my mother, and there are three more waiting for my stepfather when he gets home – two for the head, one for the chest.”

BW testified: “She asked if I wanted to go out while she took care of her stepfather.”

BW was in the backyard when three more shots were fired.

Mr Smylie said: “When I opened the door … the gun went in my face before the door was three or four inches wide. It went off two more times, but after the first shot my hand was on the gun and I turned it away from Carly.”

His stepdaughter screamed “as if she had seen a demon” as she fled, jumping over a fence. She was soon captured.

Mr Smylie, who had suffered a graze wound to the shoulder, was horrified when he found his wife's body.

Notably, he said his stepdaughter remained “a sweet little girl” and was “not herself” when she carried out the shootings. He said he spoke to her every day and their relationship was “good.”

He said her bipolar father, Kevin Gregg, took drugs “constantly” in her presence and gave her beer when she was 12.

Apparently, Mrs. Smylie always kept the Magnum handy in case her ex-husband turned up. Gregg had to endure other traumas in her childhood – when she was four, a sister died and her parents divorced. At eleven, she became depressed and began to self-harm.

Psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Clark told the court that he believed she was “unconscious” for up to 90 minutes during the shooting and that she herself told him she “heard voices.”

But prosecutor Michael Smith dismissed Gregg's amnesia as “convenient” and said her ability to hide the gun from the security camera and boast about her plan to shoot Mr Smylie after killing her mother showed she knew “the difference between good and evil”.

On Friday, the teenager was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A jury in Rankin County, Mississippi, found Gregg guilty on all counts, and prosecutor Kathryn Newman said Gregg showed “no remorse whatsoever.”