A teenager on trial for murdering her mother and attempting to kill her stepfather laughed and tried to cover her mouth as the fourth day of her trial began.
Carly Gregg is accused of shooting her mother to death inside the family home in Mississippi on March 19, when she was just 14 years old.
He was offered a plea deal of 40 years in prison, but he rejected it and his legal team is instead seeking an insanity defense.
On Thursday, as the fourth day of the trial began, Gregg was captured on the livestream trying to contain his laughter.
A teenager on trial for murdering her mother and attempting to kill her stepfather laughed and tried to cover her mouth as the fourth day of proceedings began.
On Thursday, as the fourth day of the trial began, Gregg was caught on the livestream trying to contain a fit of laughter.
He was watching a member of his defense team scribbling something on a piece of paper, although it is not clear what the note said.
In a split second, Gregg smiled and covered his mouth with his hand.
There was no audio available on the livestream to capture what he said immediately after the incident.
Gregg is accused of shooting his mother and trying to lure his stepfather back into the house with a text message sent from his mother’s phone.
Rebecca Kirk, a licensed professional counselor who saw Gregg on nine occasions in the weeks before the alleged crime, testified Thursday about the teen’s behavior during their sessions.
On February 14, just weeks before the shooting, Gregg said he planned to read Crime and Punishment.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1886 novel follows a Russian psychopath who, in Kirk’s words, “is very intelligent… and he has this obsessive thought of planning to murder a woman.”
After going through with his wishes, he is eventually sentenced to eight years in a Russian labor camp after being declared insane.
“When he was in the field he had no regrets and he didn’t think what he did was wrong and he thought the woman deserved it,” Kirk told the court.
The defense told the court that Gregg never actually read the book.
Kirk said Gregg was a very talented student and a patient who “had been given a lot of validation in his life for being smart.”
“She was proud of that, but she also had a genuine love of learning,” he told the court.
“She had a gift, that’s a fact. Sometimes when you’re so talented and different from everyone else, it can make you feel lonely and a little bit isolated.”
Gregg’s mother, math teacher Ashley Smylie, 40, was fatally shot in the face.
Harrowing footage of Carly Gregg calmly wandering around her kitchen was 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” mental illness.
Dr Clark told the court that Gregg told him she had been having “auditory hallucinations” for years before the alleged offence, but that the voices in her head had never “commanded” her to do anything.
Gregg had confided to Dr. Clark that he had started smoking marijuana, several times a week, and was worried about his mother finding out, the court heard.
The court heard that she had been using marijuana at least up until the day before the alleged incident. She had also been prescribed Lexapro and Zoloft, both medications for mood disorders.
She is charged with murder, attempted murder and tampering with evidence, and faces a life sentence if convicted.
