U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) had a harsh response to U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) after the congresswoman defended convicted murderer Karmelo Anthony, spread falsehoods about the case and suggested that she would also have stabbed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf under the same set of circumstances.
Gill made the remarks while addressing reports of harassment and death threats against the family of Metcalf, a 17-year-old who was fatally stabbed in April 2025 at a track meet in Frisco, Texas. Karmelo Anthony, then 18 and now 19, was convicted of first-degree murder by a Collin County jury on June 9, 2026, and sentenced to 35 years in prison the following day.
The case involved Anthony entering a tent used by Metcalf’s Memorial High School track team during an event. Witnesses stated that Metcalf, his twin brother and multiple other teens asked Anthony to leave multiple times, after which the black teen retrieved a knife from his backpack and fatally stabbed Metcalf in the chest.
Crockett, in responses on her podcast “Clock It with Crockett” and in interviews following the verdict, expressed sympathy for Anthony and criticized the outcome. She falsely referred to the knife as a small “Swiss Army knife” or multi-tool with features like scissors, downplaying its lethality.
“Wait a minute, it was this? … Yeah, like with the little scissors and everything and whatever. So it was small. Well, I would argue the size of it alone, you wouldn’t even think it’s a deadly weapon,” she said.
Crockett also questioned the jury’s impartiality by claiming it was “all-white,” a blatantly false statement, as the jury contained Hispanic and Indian individuals. “I’m not necessarily convinced — not that I could tell you the name of one person on this jury — that we had 12 impartial White folk out of Collin County sitting on a jury for this young black man,” she said.
Crockett further described the verdict as “evidence of a broken system” and suggested race played a role, stating that the outcome might have differed if the races were reversed. “Black women, especially black women who have black male children, live in fear and agony every single day. A fear and agony that I promise you the Metcalfs probably never spent a day living that way. We’re gonna have some real conversations about race in this country,” the congresswoman said in reference to the murder victim’s family.
Rep. Gill responded to Crockett’s comments while speaking with Fox News. “I mean, this is absolutely despicable. I mean, imagine if that was your son, he was at a track meet and was stabbed in cold blood, stabbed to death, and instead of getting sympathy for many people in your community, you have a bunch of hooligans and thugs and race-baiters calling you up and telling you that you should be next — that your family should suffer, the rest of your family should suffer the same fate. That is so antithetical to everything that this country stands for. It’s absolutely gross,” he said.
“But what disappoints me the most is that you’ve got people in power — Jasmine Crockett, for instance, one of my fellow congresswomen, who is a race-baiting thug, who is stating quite plainly, very recently, that the American people ought to have sympathy for Karmelo Anthony because he’s black — not for any other reason, but because he’s black,” the congressman continued. “That’s the kind of stuff that leads to this racial divisiveness.”
