McKINNEY, Texas — Karmelo Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison Tuesday, just hours after a Texas jury found him guilty of murder in the 2025 killing of Austin Metcalf, a fellow high school student, at a Dallas-area track meet.
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The verdict, reached in less than three hours and read by Texas District Court Judge John Roach Jr., could have carried a maximum of 99 years. Anthony was 17 at the time, but Texas law allowed him to be charged as an adult. He is now 19.
During the subsequent sentencing phase Tuesday evening, the jury rejected defense arguments that Anthony’s attack was carried out under “sudden passion,” which could have reduced his time.
Some in the courtroom reacted with cries, and Metcalf’s twin brother, Hunter, who made his first appearance in the courtroom, leaned forward. Anthony’s mother wept. Roach had warned people in the courtroom to control their emotions when the verdict was read. Anthony’s attorney kept an arm wrapped around him.
Metcalf, 17, was fatally stabbed on April 2, 2025, as the track teams of Anthony’s Centennial High School and Metcalf’s Memorial High School participated in a districtwide meet in Frisco, a Dallas suburb.
Anthony admitted the stabbing, but his legal team argued he acted in self-defense, under the pressure of physical intimidation, after he had sat in the bleachers under the tent of rival high school Memorial and was confronted by members of its track team and told to leave.
Metcalf died in Hunter’s arms that rainy day, their father said.
After Anthony was sentenced, Metcalf’s mother, Meghan, spoke, calling her son a “peacemaker” and “protector” and saying her loss will outlast Anthony’s time behind bars.
“You may have just been given a sentence of 35 years,” she said in court, addressing Anthony. “You should feel lucky, because I’ve been sentenced to a life without my son.”
Father Jeff also spoke, announcing the establishment of a scholarship in his late son’s name and addressing the issue of race — Metcalf was white and Anthony is Black — which had been debated online and bled into the real-world.
Jeff Metcalf said “this was never about race or politics” and emphasized that “We’re all humans. We all bleed the same color.”
He told Anthony not too look down as he spoke.
The murder, he said, came down to “how you were raised with values and character. My kids have a wide array of friends. They weren’t bullies. They weren’t racists.”
He said it was time for Anthony to face the consequences of his actions.
“We were robbed,” Jeff Metcalf said, later adding that he feels “pure unfiltered rage” about his son’s murder.
Hunter, Metcalf’s twin, said he spent much of the last year learning how to forgive.
“You took someone from me who was supposed to be uncle, godfather to my kids,” he said. “Now I want everything taken from you.”
“You let the devil take over in that moment,” he told Anthony.
After his statement, Hunter Metcalf returned to teenage friends and supporters in court and was received with hugs. Anthony was taken away.
The defense had called only Anthony’s mother to speak on his behalf before sentencing.
She gave a tearful statement asking the jury to “please have mercy on my son.” She said he is her oldest and “is very sorry for what he did.” Anthony wept during her testimony.
Jurors were instructed to consider whether Anthony acted under the influence of “sudden passion,” which reduces the maximum penalty.
Defense attorney Mike Howard told jurors that the law recognizes that “decisions made in the heat of the moment are different than decisions that come after reflection.”
But prosecutor Dewey Mitchell tried to sway jurors to impose a harsher sentence, saying, “Whether you like it or not, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
In closing arguments earlier, Howard told jurors that prosecutors failed to prove his client did “anything but defend himself” after Metcalf and others became enraged that Anthony was in their high school’s tent.
Howard had sought to establish during the trial that going to rival teams’ tents and socializing is customary at meets, that Anthony was invited to the tent and that Metcalf and Hunter, standing nearby, were physically intimidating.
“Is it reasonable to worry these kids might jump in, that Hunter might pop in to defend his brother … because the split second of chaos is you can’t know what’s about to happen,” he said.
Prosecuting attorney Bill Wirskye rebutted that depiction of events, saying it was Anthony who threatened Metcalf when he warned, “Touch me and find out,” quoting a trial witness.
The stabbing “is murder, murder, murder,” Wirskye said.
Wirskye maintained that the encounter was one-on-one and that others under the tent had not turned on him. Video shown during the trial supported that argument, he said.
He said that while some say the events were a tragedy for everyone involved, it’s not a tragedy for Anthony.
“It’s the decisions he made and that he has to come to terms with,” Wirskye said.
During the trial, several witnesses, many of them friends or teammates of Metcalf’s, said Metcalf at one point pushed Anthony to get him to move. There was some disagreement among them over how hard the push was. But several maintained Anthony bore primary responsibility, including a former friend of Anthony’s who invited him to the tent and was close to Metcalf.
Some of the key witnesses were under 18, and Roach issued an order preventing publishing their names.
A school resource officer testified that, after the stabbing, Anthony said he’d warned Metcalf not to touch him, but he also said Anthony said he had committed the stabbing and asked whether Metcalf was going to be OK.
Metcalf was the MVP of his football team and had a 4.0 GPA, his father, Jeff Metcalf, has said. “He was loved by many. He was a leader,” the elder Metcalf said.
Anthony had a 3.7 GPA going into the last weeks of the school year in 2025, NBC Dallas-Fort Worth reported. He posted $250,000 bond and was placed under house arrest. He was permitted to graduate under an agreement between advocates and the Frisco Independent School District, according to the station.
The case’s racial components were debated online. A couple of weeks after Metcalf’s death, a participant in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, pardoned by President Donald Trump, led a small protest at the stadium as leader of the group “Protect White America.” It drew counterprotesters and was denounced by Metcalf’s father.
Last week, the Next Generation Action Network, a civil rights organization that advocated in favor of Anthony, denounced the racial composition of the jury, noting that not one juror is Black.
Prosecutors had downplayed race as an issue.
After sentencing, Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis spoke outside the courthouse. He praised prosecutors and the jury for delivering accountability, and commended the teenagers who testified and “did the right thing.”
Willis also thanked the broader Collin County community.
“I asked our community to ignore all the noise and instead be levelheaded and patient as the process worked,” he said. “And today, the process delivered accountability.”
Suzanne Gamboa reported from Austin, Texas; Maria Guerrero from McKinney, Texas; and Dennis Romero from Los Angeles.
