A teenage girl on trial accused of murdering her mom and attempting to kill her stepdad giggled and tried to cover her mouth as day four of proceedings got underway.
Carly Gregg is accused of shooting her mom dead inside the family home in Mississippi on March 19, when she was just 14 years old.
She was offered a plea deal of 40 years in prison, but turned it down and her legal team is instead pursuing an insanity defense.
On Thursday, as day four of the trial got underway, Gregg was caught on the livestream trying to fight off a bout of the giggles.
A teenage girl on trial accused of murdering her mom and attempting to kill her stepdad giggled and tried to cover her mouth as day four of proceedings got underway
On Thursday, as day four of the trial got underway, Gregg was caught on the livestream trying to fight off a bout of the giggles
She was watching a member of her defense team scrawl something on a piece of paper, although it’s unclear what the note said.
In a split second moment, Gregg smiled and covered her mouth with her hand.
There was no audio available on the livestream to pick up what she said immediately following the incident.
Gregg is accused of shooting her mom and attempting to lure her stepdad back to the home with a text sent from her mother’s phone.
Rebecca Kirk, a licensed professional counsellor who saw Gregg on nine occasions in the weeks leading to the alleged crime, testified on Thursday about the teenager’s demeanor during their sessions.
On February 14 – just weeks before the shooting – Gregg said that she had plans to read Crime and Punishment.
The 1886 Fyodor Dostoevsky novel follows a Russian psychopath who, in Kirk’s words, ‘is very intelligent… and has this obsessive thinking of planning to murder a woman.’
After following through on his desires, he is eventually sentenced to eight years in a Russian labor camp after he was declared insane.
‘When he was in the camp he was unrepentant and that he did not think what he did was wrong and thought that the woman deserved it,’ Kirk told the court.
The defense told the court Gregg never got around to reading the book.
Kirk expressed that Gregg was a highly gifted student and patient who ‘had been affirmed a lot in her life for being intelligent.’
‘She was proud of that, but she also had a genuine love for learning,’ she told the court.
‘She was gifted, that’s a clear fact. Sometimes when you’re so gifted and different from others, you might feel lonely and a little bit more isolated.’
Gregg’s mother, 40-year-old math teacher Ashley Smylie was fatally shot in the face
Harrowing footage of Carly Gregg casually wandering around her kitchen has been played in court during her murder trial in Mississippi this week
The court heard on Wednesday from psychiatrist Dr Andrew Clark, who said he believes Gregg ‘blacked out’ for up to 90 minutes on the day of the alleged offence.
But he also accepted that someone in Gregg’s position would have a motive to ‘fake’ a mental illness.
Dr Clark told the court Gregg reported to him that she’d had ‘auditory hallucinations’ for years prior to the alleged crime, but the voices in her head had never ‘commanded’ her to do anything.
Gregg had confided in Dr Clark that she had started smoking marijuana, several times per week and was concerned that her mother would find out, the court heard.
The court heard she had used marijuana up until at least the day prior to the alleged incident. She had also been prescribed Lexapro and Zoloft – both medications for mood disorders.
She is charged with murder, attempted murder and evidence tampering, and faces a life sentence if found guilty.
