35 YEARS FOR KARMELO ANTHONY… YET THE BIGGEST BATTLE MAY STILL BE AHEAD.
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.
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 did not consider 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.
Immediately following the verdict, the judge moved on to the sentencing hearing.
The defense 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 — Metcalf was white and Anthony is Black — 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.
Metcalf’s attorneys have downplayed race as an issue.
