Jury seated in the Frisco Track Meet stabbing trial — opening statements set for tomorrow

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]We begin tonight with breaking news. A jury has just been seated in the track meet stabbing trial.

[00:00:07]>> Yeah, and this sets the stage for opening statements tomorrow. Jurors will hear evidence from a fatal stabbing last spring at that track meet in Gallatin County and decide whether Carmelo Anthony is guilty of murder in the death of Austin Metcalfe.

[00:00:21]>> Want to bring in senior crime and justice reporter Rebecca Lopez. So Rebecca, there was a long day of questioning of these potential jurors.

[00:00:28]What were the attorneys looking for and how did they select this jury?

[00:00:34]>> Look, Cynthia, they were looking for anyone that was biased or had any kind of prejudices. They grilled this jury on everything from race, age to how they felt about self-defense. They gave them the law. Could they follow the law? They were asked all of these questions and the prosecution did something that he says he's never done in his 30 years as a prosecutor. He says that he had to have a conversation with them and ask them questions about race. And then the defense did something I've also never seen them do. They asked an off-topic question. How they felt about the current immigration policy. And again, what they're looking for was 12 jurors and six alternates that could be unbiased, unprejudiced, and judge this case on the law and on the evidence. And so that's what they did and they came up with a jury this afternoon. They did each have 10 strikes, which means they could each remove 10 people on each side and then the judge had unlimited strikes. There towards the end there were some questions that were raised by the defense on some of the people that did get excluded. And I'm going to bring in my colleague Jobin Panicker who was in the courtroom. Jobin, some of this was about race. What was this all about?

[00:01:41]>> Yeah, so as you said, you know, this is a process. I think the best way to talk about this is to talk about how the process of striking works, right?

[00:01:47]Striking is dismissing a juror.

[00:01:49]Mike Howard, who is with the defense, put out an objection and I'm going to quote it so that so that we so that we can be clear on this, his quote was there were three objections to three potential jurors, jurors 27, 37, and 48.

[00:02:05]The quote is, "Those three were 100% of the available African-American jurors in the strike zone." And Howard, Mike Howard, is essentially saying that they were struck because for for race reasons. The state came back and said, "No, we struck those jurors because they were educators."

[00:02:24]The judge ultimately sided with the prosecution. That challenge was denied.

[00:02:29]And so they are not on the jury.

[00:02:31]>> But it is important to note that we don't know the makeup of this jury and there might be minorities or people of mixed race.

[00:02:37]>> Yeah. Yeah, we it is way too early for us to to even guess and I think it's dangerous for us to guess who it who makes up this jury. We will not know until we get in there tomorrow morning when uh opening statements begin.

[00:02:49]>> Okay, and there you go. Opening statements tomorrow morning, we will be here for all of that. Back to you guys.

[00:02:54]>> All right, thank you very much. And just want to let you know, with no cameras allowed, we will be your eyes and ears in the courtroom. Uh make sure to watch After the Trial on WFAA Plus. Our team will break down the latest developments at 8:00 p.m. And if you'd like to follow along in real time, grab your mobile device and open the WFAA app or WFAA.com.

[00:03:14]We'll be providing hourly updates from the courtroom.