The Killing of Austin Metcalf
The altercation took place at Kuykendall Stadium, where students from Centennial High School and Memorial High School had taken shelter from the storm under their respective team tents.
Anthony, a Centennial High School junior, walked into the tent for Memorial High School, witnesses said Metcalf, a Memorial High School junior, told Anthony to leave.
According to witnesses who later testified at his trial, Anthony responded, “Touch me and see what happens.” When Metcalf shoved him, Anthony pulled out a knife and stabbed him once in the chest, they said, then fled.
Metcalf was pronounced dead at an area hospital. Law enforcement officers took Anthony into custody at the stadium.
Anthony was prosecuted as an adult under Texas law, which automatically transfers 17-year-old juveniles into the adult criminal justice system. States largely adopted such laws to ensure courts could continue supervising offenders well beyond the age limits of the juvenile system, generally once defendants reach their early 20s, Jeffrey Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
A Jury Without Black Jurors
Anthony’s jury selection, which began on June 1, 2026, became a focal point for outside commentary and protest in his case: The final panel of 18 men and women—drawn from a pool of more than 500 residents of Collin County, Texas—did not include a single Black person.
Prosecutors had used peremptory strikes to remove the last three Black prospective jurors—all educators—from the pool, arguing that teachers could be more sympathetic to young defendants. Anthony’s attorneys said that similar white educators were allowed to remain in the jury pool and argued the strikes were racially motivated, but the judge allowed the case to proceed with no Black jurors.
Fox News reported that one white educator remained on the jury: an esthetician who taught at a trade school.
Anna Offit, a professor of law at William & Mary Law School who studies trial strategy and juries, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that “any plausible ‘neutral reason’” to strike jurors “typically satisfies the judge—even in cases where the strikes, if not racially motivated, obviously produce significant demographic distortion in the jury.” In Anthony’s case, Offit says, “I don’t think there is anything the defense could have done.”
During the trial, prosecutors portrayed the stabbing as a senseless killing that Anthony could have avoided the altercation by leaving the tent. Instead, they argued, he escalated the confrontation by challenging Metcalf and other students after being told to leave the tent, then responded to a shove with deadly force.
Anthony’s attorneys countered that he had acted in self-defense, arguing that Anthony reasonably believed he faced an imminent threat after Metcalf pushed him and that his actions were justified as self-defense. They urged the jury to acquit Anthony or, if they rejected his self-defense claim, to convict him of the lesser offense of manslaughter.
After deliberating for less than three hours, the jury returned a guilty verdict for murder and sentenced Anthony to 35 years in prison. A murder conviction carries a maximum of 99 years in prison in Texas.
The sentence drew sharply differing reactions by observers, with some arguing it was too lenient given the circumstances of the killing and others contending that sending a teenager to prison for decades was excessive.
"You should feel lucky, because I've been sentenced to a lifetime without my son," Austin's mom, Meghan Metcalf, said to Anthony at the sentencing.
Butts says research has generally found that lengthy prison sentences for juveniles do little to improve public safety. “If it’s just about payback and demonstrating state power, then the longer the better,” he says.
Karmelo Anthony’s Appeal
Less than 24 hours after the June 9, 2026, verdict, Anthony’s legal team filed a formal notice of appeal, initiating the process of review in Texas appellate courts.
Anthony, now 19, is being represented on appeal by a high-profile team of civil rights and criminal defense attorneys who have agreed to take the case pro bono. In announcing their representation, the lawyers said their role is to determine whether legal errors occurred during the trial and to ensure that “every issue supported by the record is fully and vigorously presented on appeal.”
Offit says overturning a conviction based on jury selection is notoriously difficult “for the same reason that it is difficult to address at trial: reviewing courts do not have deeper insight into what a challenged party was focused on when strike decisions were made than a trial judge would.”
“Still,” she adds, “there is a way.”
Appellate courts can still find evidence of discrimination by closely comparing how lawyers questioned prospective jurors and whether they applied the same standards consistently, Offit says. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Flowers v. Mississippi, for example, the justices found that prosecutors treated Black prospective jurors differently than white jurors who gave similar answers. That comparison ultimately led the court to overturn the conviction.
In Anthony’s case, “if white educators remained in the jury box while Black educators were removed peremptorily, opposing counsel might argue that the otherwise permissible and neutral grounds for the strikes were in fact a pretext for illegal discrimination,” she says.
In a July 2026 filing, Anthony’s defense team asked for a new trial, arguing that public access to his trial was restricted in ways that violated his Sixth Amendment rights. The attorneys also alleged that pressure from prosecutors had kept Anthony from testifying in his own defense.
Prosecutors released a written statement in response to the filing, saying that they had “conducted this trial ethically and in full compliance with the court’s rulings.”
Since his conviction, Anthony has been transferred into the Wallace Pack Unit outside of Houston, where he began serving his 35-year sentence. His appellate review could take months or years depending on filings and rulings by higher courts.
