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A 15-year-old girl was sentenced to life in prison without parole after murdering her mother and then inviting a friend to see the body.
Carly Madison Gregg was sentenced Friday in Rankin County, Mississippi, for the fatal shooting of her mother, Ashley Smylie, the attempted murder of her stepfather and tampering with evidence.
In March, Gregg entered her mother’s bedroom and shot her. She then texted her stepfather, Heath Smylie, to come home. When he arrived, she shot him, grazing his shoulder.
The jury deliberated for two hours on the verdict and a third hour on sentencing. Prosecutor Kathryn Newman argued that the sentence was appropriate because Gregg had shown “zero remorse.”
“She knew what she was doing,” Newman said in court. Mississippi-Clarion-Ledger.
The life sentence will be served in parallel with a ten-year prison sentence for falsifying evidence.
Gregg had previously rejected the offer to spend 40 years behind bars in exchange for a plea deal.
The teenager burst into tears as the verdict and sentence were read out, and he was reportedly given words of encouragement in the courtroom.
Defense attorney Kevin Camp told jurors that a life sentence would “make things even worse for the family.” He argued in court that the shooting occurred when Gregg was 14 and in the midst of a mental health crisis.
Gregg plans to appeal, WAPT reports.
“A long week, a sad day. Carly Gregg is evil. That’s not easy to say, but the truth is, sometimes evil comes in young, small packages – and this is one of those cases,” said Bubba Bramlett, district attorney for Rankin and Madison counties, after the verdict.
“She’s going to spend the rest of her life in prison. It’s really upsetting. She’s 15 years old, but that’s exactly where she belongs.”
During the trial, Gregg’s stepfather described her as a “sweet little girl” and described how he came home and found her in an apparent state of mental distress.
“She was screaming like crazy in fear,” Heath Smylie said. “It was like she saw a demon or something, and my first thought was there was an intruder somewhere and she thought she was after someone else.”
Smylie told the court that he and his stepdaughter talk to each other almost every day.
“I think we’re good. We talk almost every day now. I don’t always get home from work in time to call her, but we send a few texts back and forth on the app when it’s allowed, and we talk on the video chat that’s allowed in prison on weekends,” he said. “We’re good.”
He said he believed the teenager did not recognize him during the shooting.
“To this day I don’t believe she recognized me,” he said. “Something was wrong.”
Jurors saw surveillance video that showed Gregg walking into her mother’s bedroom with a gun strapped to her back, where gunshots and screaming could be heard. Prosecutors said the teenager hid the footage after the shooting.
After the shooting, Gregg invited a friend over to look at the body. “Do you get a bad feeling around dead bodies?” the friend, identified in court documents as BW because of his minor status, recalled Gregg asking.
The shooting occurred after a friend told Gregg’s parents that she was using marijuana.
Much of the trial revolved around assessing the teens’ mental state at the time of the shooting, and their lawyers argued insanity.
Dr. Andrew Clark, a child psychologist, testified that Gregg had long suffered from depression and anxiety, and her mental health worsened after the death of her sister when she was four years old. Gregg appeared to have symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder and had previously self-harmed, Dr. Clark said.
He read the jury a diary entry from March 12, a week before the shooting, in which the teenager described how she herself had a “psychotic episode” in which she “actually spoke to one of the voices in her head.”
Witnesses for the prosecution testified that Gregg was competent to stand trial and that he had not reported hearing voices during psychiatric examinations in January 2024.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jason Pickett said Gregg did not meet the legal criteria for insanity, pointing to a February text message in which Gregg wrote to a friend: “You don’t understand how (expletive) psycho I was that day, I almost killed my parents.”
Pickett said, “In my opinion, Carly did not meet Mississippi’s standards of insanity at the time of the offense and was aware of the nature, quality and illegality of her actions that day.”
