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Ashley Smylie (left inset)(Northwest Rankin High School), Carly Madison Gregg (inset right) pictured in a mug shot (Rankin County Sheriff’s Office), (right) Investigators outside the crime scene (WAPT/screengrab)
A 14-year-old girl in Mississippi has been identified after being charged as an adult in the alleged murder of her mother, a high school math teacher, and the attempted murder of her stepdad, local authorities reportedly revealed Wednesday.
Carly Madison Gregg stands accused of opening fire on Tuesday evening and killing 40-year-old Ashley Smylie at their Brandon home on Ashton Way, not far from the Magnolia State’s capital of Jackson. Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey said that Gregg also shot her stepdad in the arm, but the man fought back, grabbed the gun, and survived, AL.com reported.
After the shooting, the teen defendant reportedly fled the scene by hopping a fence, prompting investigators to track her movements by helicopter and arrest her approximately a half hour after authorities first learned of the deadly violence.
The surviving victim told deputies that he came home to find that Smylie was fatally shot and that his daughter was holding the murder weapon, a pistol, local ABC affiliate WAPT reported.
While it is not yet clear what led to the shooting, reports have identified Ashley Smylie as a veteran teacher, most recently at the same school Gregg attended, Northwest Rankin High School.
The Vicksburg Daily News reported that Smylie was honored in 2022 with a “Teacher of the Month” award.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office, now tasked with investigating a gruesome murder, has been in the news for entirely different reasons of late, as five of its “Goon Squad” ex-deputies face punishment for the racist torture of two Black men.
Calls for Sheriff Bailey’s resignation have intensified as a result.
As recently as February, the New York Times published an article that said documents showed the sheriff in 2014 repeatedly sought grand jury subpoenas so he could obtain phone records and spy on his girlfriend, a married woman:
But his requests had nothing to do with alleged wrongdoing, or any criminal investigation, according to a previously undisclosed report obtained by The New York Times and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today. Instead, Sheriff Bailey tapped into the power of a grand jury at least eight times over a year to spy on his married girlfriend and the school employee with whom she was also “unfaithful,” the documents show.
