Texas track meet stabbing: Suspect allegedly told police he was protecting himself
Frisco Police Department
(FRISCO, Texas) — A 17-year-old student charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of another student at a track meet allegedly confessed to the killing and officers say he told them he was protecting himself, according to the arrest report.
The incident occurred Wednesday morning at a Frisco Independent School District stadium during a track and field championship involving multiple schools in the district.
Austin Metcalf, 17, an 11th grader at Frisco Memorial High School, died after police said another student stabbed him during an altercation in the bleachers at the meet.
The suspect in the deadly stabbing — Karmelo Anthony, a student at Frisco Centennial High School — has been charged with first-degree murder, police said.
One officer who responded to the scene said Anthony told him unprompted, without being asked any questions about the incident, “I was protecting myself,” according to the arrest report.
When the officer advised another responding officer that he had “the alleged suspect,” Anthony reportedly responded, “I’m not alleged, I did it,” according to the arrest report.
As he was walking toward the squad car, Anthony “was emotional,” reportedly saying unprompted, “He put his hands on me, I told him not to,” according to the arrest report. Once in the back seat, he also reportedly asked if Metcalf was “going to be OK,” according to the report.
Anthony “made another spontaneous statement” and reportedly asked an officer if what happened “could be considered self-defense,” according to the arrest report. Another officer reported that the suspect was “crying hysterically” while being walked away from the stadium, the report said.
Anthony is being held in the Collin County jail on $1 million bond, court records show. When reached for comment on Friday, his attorney told ABC News he had been on the case for only a few hours and needed to catch up.
Anthony’s father told ABC News on Thursday that they do not have a statement to make at this time.
The stabbing occurred under the Memorial High School tent in the stadium bleachers at approximately 10 a.m. on Wednesday, according to the arrest report.
Responding officers say they spoke to multiple witnesses, including one who reported that the altercation began after Metcalf told Anthony to move out from under their team’s tent, according to the arrest report.
The witness reported that Anthony allegedly reached inside his bag and said, “Touch me and see what happens,” according to the arrest report.
According to a witness, Metcalf grabbed Anthony to move him, and Anthony allegedly pulled out what the witness described as a black knife and “stabbed Austin once in the chest and then ran away,” the arrest report stated.
An officer recovered a bloody knife in the bleachers, according to the report.
Metcalf was transported to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 10:53 a.m. on Wednesday, according to the arrest report.
His twin brother, Hunter Metcalf, was also at the meet and spoke to officers at the scene. He said that after his brother told Anthony he had to leave the tent because he didn’t go to Memorial, the two “went back and forth and then Austin stood up and pushed the male to get him out of the tent,” according to the arrest report.
“I tried to whip around as fast as I could, but I didn’t see the stab,” Hunter Metcalf told Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA. “It was really senseless. I don’t know why a person would do that to someone, just over that little argument.”
The track meet has been postponed to Monday and will be held at a new location, WFAA reported. Frisco ISD will share more details on updated security measures with families, according to the station.
(WASHINGTON) — When unemployed marine biologist Lanny Flaherty poked his head into the ranger’s station at the Wallowa Whitman National Forest in the Pacific Northwest and asked to be a volunteer, he said it put him on a 13-year career path with the U.S. Forest Service that included stints as a botanist, a wildfire resource adviser and a range ecologist.
When he wasn’t researching the effects of vegetation on fire behavior or identifying fungi on national forest land, the 40-year-old Flaherty said he was a “red-card” carrying certified firefighter, helping battle some of the biggest wildland fires in the nation.
In 2016, he helped fight the Great Smoky Mountain wildfires, the largest arson blazes in Tennessee history, and in 2021, he helped extinguish the Dixie Fire that swept through five Northern California counties, scorching nearly a million acres and destroying more than 1,300 structures.
“I’m so proud of everything I’ve done,” Flaherty told ABC News. “Stumbling into the Forest Service was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Oh, this fits. I’m running with it. This is me.'”
But while on assignment last week with a U.S. Forest Service fire engine crew in Louisiana restoring federal land and structures at the Kisatchie National Forest that had been devastated by hurricanes, Flaherty said his job came to an abrupt end.
As a probationary range ecologist, he was among several thousand probationary workers terminated from the U.S. Forest Service in the Trump administration’s sweeping reduction in the federal workforce being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to end up under the bus on what’s obviously a politically motivated illegal termination,” said Flaherty, whose two-year probationary period wasn’t scheduled to end until November of this year. “I mean, I’ve got 13 years’ worth of qualifications and I was cast aside as a probationary employee, despite having proven myself time and time again in a multitude of different positions.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, announced that 2,000 USFS “probationary, non-firefighting employees” were being let go. At least 1,000 probationary employees of the National Park Service, which is under the U.S. Interior Department, were also terminated, including those who worked as secondary firefighters.
“To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.
Rollins, according to the USDA statement, “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people.”
“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve people, not the bureaucracy,” the USDA statement reads.
‘These fires are going to get exponentially bigger’
While hosting a roundtable in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters, Rollins praised their response to the devastating January wildfires in Los Angeles County that decimated the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Following the meeting, the USDA released a statement, saying, Rollins is “committed to ensuring that the United States has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world to save lives and protect our beautiful homeland.”
But the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) told ABC News that the USFS cuts will severely weaken the agency’s ability to respond to wildfires.
Steve Gutierrez, NFFE’s national business representative, said that based on data the union requested from the USFS, the number of fired probationary non-fire personnel is about 3,400.
Flaherty said that in the past five years, 40% to 50% of his job was fighting wildfires as part of what the Forest Services refers to as “militias” comprised of trained secondary firefighters.
“When a fire breaks out, we’re out there like everybody else getting into the fray,” Flaherty said.
Gutierrez, a former USFS firefighter, told ABC News that the cuts affect about 10% of the U.S. Forest Service’s total workforce. He said many of the terminated employees held dual jobs, like Flaherty, including working as firefighters responding to all-hands-on-deck blazes throughout the country.
“When I say ‘non-fire personnel,’ we can’t totally think that they don’t ever touch fire, that they’re not important,” Gutierrez said. “They’re all part of this logistical machine that helps support fire. They’re either ecologists, they’re mechanics, they’re pilots, they’re water systems operators, they’re grants and agreements folks, they’re land management, minerals and geologists to help recovery efforts from the aftereffect of fire.”
He added, “They support all of what happens before fire, during a fire and after a fire.”
Gutierrez said some of the federal employees who got fired had just helped battle the Los Angeles fires just weeks ago.
“They just fought this fire in LA, one of LA’s most devastating wildfires that we’ve ever had and now they’re terminated because they have ‘poor performance,'” Gutierrez said. “It’s just crazy to me that you can be so utterly disrespectful and ultimately it’s a slap in the face to these brave men and women who have risked their lives for the American public.”
Making matters worse, Gutierrez said, is an imposed hiring freeze, which has stalled the annual task of “fuels management,” which means clearing federal lands of fire hazards like dead trees and overgrown brush.
“If we’re not able to get that process moving immediately, fires are not going to just be, like, small. These fires are going to get exponentially bigger. Communities are going to burn and people are going to die, and that’s what’s going to happen,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not going to be just a California problem. It’s going to be a United States problem. I mean, there are several states, New Jersey, for example, they had a fire every year, every month for the past year. There was a fire in New York, right there in Manhattan. It’s not going to stop. It’s a national issue.”
Almost stranded in Louisiana
Flaherty said that when he got a call in Louisiana from his forest supervisor relating that he was terminated effective immediately with no severance package, he was initially told he’d have to get his own transportation back to Oregon.
“He offered no solution whatsoever, despite being fully aware of the fact that I would be stranded in Louisiana and unable to make travel arrangements short of purchasing myself a ticket. I was not in Louisiana on my own time, I was there on official travel and his plan was to, I guess, just wing it,” Flaherty said.
Flaherty said his union, the NFFE, intervened and got the USFS to cover his transportation by temporarily rescinding his termination until it got him back to Oregon.
“It’s just really sad that the top of the food chain doesn’t understand the impacts of what they’re doing when they swipe their pen,” said Gutierrez, responding to Flaherty almost being stranded in Louisiana. “They don’t understand the complexities of the entirety of the government.”
Flaherty said the “insult still rings true even though I am back home.”
“To me, that just kind of sums up how callous and poorly thought out all of this is,” Flaherty said. “I have deep, deep concerns for the amount of stress that everybody has been put through in every agency, and it just continues. It’s harming people’s physical and mental well-being, and it’s criminal.”
‘Dream job’
Eric Anderson said that in June 2024 he landed a job as a biological science technician and lead fire effects monitor for the National Park Service, after working since 2021 as a seasonal employee.
“I spent two years, three years working as a temporary hire to keep my face seen, to improve my qualifications, to gain more experience. And now, I finally get into a position that I knew three years ago, OK, my predecessor, is probably going to be retiring. I think I can improve my qualifications and become useful to do that position. And I worked toward it, I applied, and I got the position.”
Like Flaherty, Anderson, 48, a married father of two high school-aged children, told ABC News that he was fired in what he called, “the Valentine’s Day massacre.”
“You finally get your dream job that you’ve been working toward for many years, and it just got pulled out from under you for politics,” said Anderson, who was stationed at the Indiana Dunes National Park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
He said he received his dismissal letter in his email inbox from an Interior Department administrator he had never met.
“The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate, during the probationary period, your appointment to the position of BioScience Tech (Fire Eff. Monitor),” reads the dismissal letter Anderson shared with ABC News.
“This is a lie. This says I’m fired because of my performance and my inability to do the job and that I’m no longer needed. My performance evaluations are excellent, and I’m crucial to the program. I have qualifications that we need within our unit to function,” Anderson said. “It’s a bit maddening.”
A former Peace Corps volunteer from 2000 to 2002 in Kenya, East Africa, Anderson said he used to work as a consultant in the private sector and took a huge pay cut when he joined the NPS as a seasonal employee.
“My bosses worked really hard to justify that I should be kept on, noting that in my position description, yes, it says biological science technician, but if you just read down a few lines, you see the box checked that says wildland firefighter, which was supposed to be in the protected ones that weren’t getting fired,” Anderson said.
In his job as a biological science technician, he said he would collect plant samples for analysis and prepped parklands in the winter months for the fire season, eliminating hazardous fuels by conducting prescribed or controlled burns. His work also included rehabilitating burned land.
“When bulldozers come through trying to protect towns, someone has to put that back together. So, we worked very much on how do we keep this from washing down the mountain during the next atmospheric river,” Anderson said. “By mid-August or so, we’re pretty much done with our sampling at various parks around the Great Lakes that we go to, and then we are available to do wildland fire or help as collaterals for wildland fires,” Anderson said. “A lot of the people that were let go in the last week were also collateral firefighters.”
In September, Anderson worked on the front lines of the Line Fire that burned more than 44,000 acres in and around the San Bernardino National Forest and threatened the community of Highland, California. In August 2023, Anderson said he helped battle the Happy Camp Complex Fire, which burned more than 21,000 acres in the Klamath National Forest in Northern California’s Siskiyou County.
He just returned in January from conducting prescribed fires in the Florida Everglades.
“Maybe, this is that Peace Corps volunteer in me that looks for mission-driven work. I know that’s just my personality type. I need to be working somewhere that I feel it’s important,” Anderson said. “I very much want to go back and work for the place that I was just fired from. I live what I do. These are all very qualified, excellent people doing good work that needs to be done and they’re just slashed without any real cause.”
Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
(LOS ANGELES) — Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has been removed by Mayor Karen Bass in the wake of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires that killed dozens and destroyed hundreds of homes.
Bass said on Friday that she removed Crowley because firefighters were sent home instead of being used when the fires broke out last month.
“We know that 1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke out were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch,” Bass said in a statement. “Furthermore, a necessary step to an investigation was the President of the Fire Commission telling Chief Crowley to do an after action report on the fires. The Chief refused. These require her removal.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — The government has claimed that Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil intentionally misrepresented information on his green card application and therefore is inadmissible to the United States.
According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump’s administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went “beyond 2022” and that he was a “political affairs officer” for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from June to November 2023.
“Khalil is now charged as inadmissible at the time of his adjustment of status because he sought to procure an immigration benefit by fraud of willful misrepresentation of a material fact,” attorneys for the administration said in the filing.
The administration also claimed that Khalil did not tell the government that he was a member of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group.
The government arrested Khalil on March 8 after invoking a rarely used provision of immigration law that they said allows the secretary of state to revoke the legal status of people whose presence in the country could have “adverse foreign policy consequences.” The new accusations seem to represent an attempt to strengthen the administration’s justification for detaining Khalil and denying his release.
“Khalil’s First Amendment allegations are a red herring, and there is an independent basis to justify removal sufficient to foreclose Khalil’s constitutional claim,” the filing says.
“The additional charges the government filed last week are completely meritless,” Marc Van Der Hout, whose legal firm represents Khalil, told ABC News in response to a request for comment. “They show that the government has no case whatsoever on this bogus charge that his presence in the U.S. would have adverse foreign policy consequences. This case is purely about First Amendment protected activity and speech, and U.S. citizens and permanent residents alike are free to say what they wish about what is going on in the world.”
“Regardless of his allegations concerning political speech, Khalil withheld membership in certain organizations and failed to disclose continuing employment by the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut when he submitted his adjustment of status application. It is black-letter law that misrepresentations in this context are not protected speech,” the government said in the filing.
During a State Department briefing Monday, spokesperson Tammy Bruce was asked multiple times about whether the department now viewed prior work for UNRWA as grounds for disqualification for visa applicants — but she repeatedly declined to answer.
“If you lie in your efforts to come to the United States to get a visa for any reason, or for a green card, maybe there haven’t been repercussions, or we haven’t done things properly in the past. A lot of things have changed with the election of Donald Trump,” Bruce said in a general statement during the briefing.
Khalil, a leader of the encampment protests at Columbia last spring, was taken upon his initial detention from his student apartment building to 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan and then to an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, before being transported to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, according to his legal team.
ABC News’ Shannon Kingston contributed to this report.
