Prosecutors rested their case on Saturday after calling 21 witnesses. Anthony’s defense moved for a directed verdict, but the judge denied the motion. His team called three witnesses Saturday, with testimony resuming Monday.
Larry Taylor, a former Texas prosecutor and longtime criminal defense attorney, told Fox News Digital that jurors will be tasked with evaluating far more than the physical evidence.
Defense attorney Mike Howard delivers opening statements during Karmelo Anthony’s murder trial in a courtroom sketch from the Collin County courthouse.
“When it comes down to an issue like this, I’m pretty sure the guys are looking at, OK, what was the situation? Was he really in danger? Was he really fearful? Why did he have a knife? Why didn’t he just get up and leave?” Taylor said.
Taylor noted that Texas self-defense laws could become a critical factor at trial.
“Did Karmelo really have a duty or obligation to retreat if he was being attacked?” he said. “It’s happening in Texas. Are we not a stand-your-ground state?”
The attorney also suggested race could become an unavoidable topic throughout the proceedings, particularly given the intense public debate surrounding the case.
“We would be fooling ourselves if we said that certain areas of our state or certain cities were not more prone to be reactive … especially when you have the polarization of black and white,” Taylor said.
Taylor further predicted that jury selection — which included no Black jurors — could face scrutiny if the defense believes Black jurors were improperly excluded from the panel, potentially setting up future appellate challenges.
Karmelo Anthony, 17, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing dєatᩚh of Texas track star Austin Metcalf.
Beyond the legal arguments, Taylor said jurors may need to be educated on something far more basic: how high school track meets actually work.
A longtime track coach who said he competed in the sport in college, Taylor pushed back on suggestions that athletes from rival schools would not know one another or interact regularly.
Karmelo Anthony is accused of stabbing Austin Metcalf to dєatᩚh during a track meet in Frisco, Texas, on April 2, 2025.
“I’ve been coaching track for 30 years. I ran track in college and it is extremely common for people to develop relationships with people from other schools that they compete against,” he said.
According to Taylor, understanding those dynamics could become important if attorneys seek to establish whether Anthony and the Metcalf brothers had prior interactions before the fatal encounter. Taylor said track meets often last for hours, with athletes from different schools spending significant time around one another throughout the day.
“I think probably four or five, if not more, of the jurors have no idea what happens at a track meet,” Taylor said.
Taylor also pushed back on claims that athletes from competing schools would have had little reason to know one another, arguing that friendships and familiarity across teams are commonplace.
He further suggested that any potential prior interactions between Anthony and the Metcalf brothers could become relevant if introduced at trial.
Another question likely to be scrutinized by jurors is why Anthony allegedly had a knife at the track meet. Taylor said that issue cannot simply be ᴀssumed away and will require explanation from the defense.
“That is going to have to be explained for this jury,” he said.
A courtroom sketch shows prosecutors delivering opening statements in the murder trial of Karmelo Anthony at the Collin County courthouse in McKinney, Texas.
Taylor noted that athletes sometimes carry small knives or tools to cut athletic tape, work on equipment or manage track spikes, though he stressed that Anthony’s specific reason for possessing the knife would need to be established through testimony and evidence.
The attorney also pushed back on criticism surrounding fundraising efforts for Anthony’s legal defense, including a fund that has raised more than $624,000 for his defense. While the defendant’s supporters have raised significant sums through online fundraising platforms, Taylor argued that mounting a vigorous defense in a serious felony case requires substantial resources.
“He is fighting literally for his life,” Taylor said, noting that expert witnesses, investigators and trial preparation can quickly become costly.
As both sides prepare for another week of testimony, Taylor believes the case remains difficult to predict.
“It’s a box of chocolates,” he said. “You are absolutely not sure what you’re going to get.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
