Carley Gregg case: A Murder to Remember
What happened :
Carley Gregg is a 15-year-old girl from Mississippi. One day, she decided to kill her mom and attempt to kill her stepdad but ended up only injuring him, then proceeded to invite her friend over to see her mom’s corpse. On the day of the incident, Dr. Andrew Clark reportedly said the young girl was easily triggered and irritable and had difficulty focusing on her schoolwork. Carley’s mom, Ashley Smylie, worked at Northwest Rankin High School, which is where Carley attended. Clark states that Carley said her mind “ went blank “ after letting her dogs out when she got home from school on March 19th, 2024. After that, she went to her parent’s bedroom and grabbed a .357 magnum pistol from under her parent’s bed, then went to her bedroom looking for her mom while hiding the gun behind her back. She then found her mom and shot her three times, the shots being fatal. After the shooting, Carley called her friends and invited them over. Once Carley’s friend arrives, Carley asks, “Are you squeamish around dead bodies?” and then leads the friend to the bedroom where her mom’s body is laid. Before Carley decided to shoot her mom, it was said by WLBT that Ashley was looking for Carley’s vape pens. Carley cared to the extent of killing her mom because when her mom found the pens, it was a tragedy. “And then, her mother finds out she’s smoking marijuana,” Clark, the psychiatrist, said in court, per WAPT. “For Carly, in particular, she cared about her mother’s approval, so for her, this was a crisis.” To Carley, she cared about her mom’s approval so much she didn’t want to disappoint her to the point she thought murdering her was better than seeing her mom be disappointed in her.
After the incident with her mom, Heath Smylie returns home and is in for a chilling discovery. Carley finds him as he gets home and shoots him. Heath then frantically calls 911 and is heard on the call saying, “She killed her mom.” This 911 call was later played for the jurors.”Gun went off in my face before the door was open,” Heath Smylie said on the stand. Heath was able to get the gun away from Carley before she could hurt him or anyone else. It is later found out that a friend told Ashley Smylie about Carley smoking weed, and soon after that, all the violence started unfolding.
The trial:
Carley Gregg’s trial began on September 20th, 2024. The Rankin County jury sentenced Carly Gregg to life in prison without parole after they found Gregg guilty of murdering her mom, attempting to murder her stepdad, and even tampering with evidence. “I put three in my mom, and I got three — I got three more waiting for my stepdad,” state prosecutor Kathryn Newman reenacted. “You think that sounds like an insane person? No.” Both sides stated different facts, and Greggs’s attorney asked the jurors not to find Carley guilty because of insanity. It took hours of deliberating between both sides for them to sentence her to life in prison without parole finally and an additional 10 years for tampering with evidence.
