They Raised $634,000 for His Defense. Then He Told the Court He’s Penniless.

Karmelo Anthony was convicted of murder on June 9, 2026, and sentenced the same day to 35 years for the April 2025 stabbing death of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a Frisco, Texas, track meet. A Collin County jury, before District Judge John Roach Jr. (R), deliberated about three hours before rejecting the defense’s self-defense claim. He is now in state prison, eligible for parole after serving half the term.

That much is settled. What is not settled — and what reopened a year of public fighting the moment the verdict came down — is the money. Anthony’s family had raised just under $634,000on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, a campaign organized by his mother, Kala Hayes, two weeks after the killing. According to the family and to GiveSendGo, donations went to legal defense, the family’s relocation, security, and living costs.

Then, one day after the conviction, Anthony filed a notice of appeal and told the court he is “a penniless, destitute, and indigent person, too poor to employ counsel” — asking the state to appoint him a lawyer. A fund of more than half a million dollars, raised expressly for his defense, and a sworn claim of indigency, filed in the same week. That gap is the story.

• $634,000 — raised on GiveSendGo against a stated goal of nearly $1.4 million, before the platform pulled the page after conviction · Source: Fox News, TMZ
• 35 years — Anthony's sentence after a Collin County jury found him guilty of murder, June 9, 2026 — parole-eligible at the halfway mark · Source: CBS Texas, NBC News
• $3,500/mo — estimated rent on the gated-community Frisco home the family moved into; reporting that they 'bought' a $900K house was rated unproven · Source: AOL/Daily Mail, Snopes
• 'indigent' — Anthony's sworn description of himself in his June appeal filing, asking the court to appoint a lawyer · Source: WFAA

Begin with what the record now establishes, because Fox News’s “convicted killer” headline — which would have been a serious overstatement at any point before this week — is, as of June 9, 2026, accurate. After a trial that opened with jury selection on June 1, a Collin County jury deliberated roughly three hours before convicting Anthony, 19, of murder. The medical examiner had testified that the single stab wound “pierced Metcalf’s heart” and was “not survivable.” The defense argued Anthony acted in self-defense after being told to leave a rival school’s tent during a rainy meet; prosecutors called it “plain and simple murder.” Anthony did not testify.

In the sentencing phase, the same jury rejected the defense’s “sudden passion” argument, which could have capped the term lower, and returned 35 years — against a range that ran from five years to life. Anthony has the right to appeal, and has filed notice of one. For the underlying killing, then, this is no longer a pending case: there is a conviction and a sentence. The remaining unsettled questions are about the money — and those we hedge carefully below.

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The “Karmelo Anthony Fund” went live on GiveSendGo on April 15, 2025 — less than two weeks after the stabbing — set up by his mother, Kala Hayes. Its stated goal was nearly $1,400,000; it ultimately took in just under $634,000, with thousands more pouring in even after the conviction before the platform removed the page. The campaign described its purpose in broad terms: “legal defense and family relocation,” plus “basic living costs, transportation, counseling, and other security measures.” GiveSendGo co-founder Jacob Wells said in April 2025 that “the bulk of this money is going to be used for Karmelo’s legal defense,” with the rest for security and “a secure location for them to live.”

When GiveSendGo closed the page after the verdict, it framed the move around the presumption of innocence: the campaign “was allowed because everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty,” the platform said, “but after his conviction things changed.” It added that the fund “was created to support pre-trial needs, and those funds were dispersed over the past year for lawful purposes,” including legal defense and relocation — and closed with a prayer for “Austin Metcalf’s family… and for justice, mercy, and peace.” Critically, the only public accounting of how the money was spent comes from the family and the platform themselves. There has been no independent audit, and Civic Intelligence treats the specific spending claims as attributed, not established.

“The fundraiser was created to support pre-trial needs, and those funds were dispersed over the past year for lawful purposes.”

GiveSendGo statement on closing the Karmelo Anthony Fund · June 2026

The most viral claim of the whole saga — that the family used donations to buy a $900,000 house and a new car — is precisely the kind of allegation that demands a hard hedge, because the fact-checkers got there first. After Anthony’s $1,000,000 bond was reduced to $250,000 and he was released to await trial on an ankle monitor, the family relocated to a home in Richwoods, a gated Frisco community about a mile from Centennial High School. Reporting, including a Daily Mail account carried by AOL, pegged the home’s value near $900,000and noted a neighbor’s claim that the family “got a new car.”

But Snopes investigated the “bought a house and car” version and rated it unproven: the family appears to have been renting — estimated at $3,500 a month — not purchasing, and there is no evidence donations were used for personal enrichment. Anthony’s mother called the enrichment claims “completely false,” and in April 2025 the family said it had “not received a single dime” from the fundraiser yet, describing access to the money as not “as simple as giving a phone call.” The viral version was amplified across X — one post tying the donations to a “$900k home” drew tens of thousands of likes and a repost from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). The defensible, sourced statement is narrower: the family relocated to a rented home in a gated community, citing safety threats, and says donations helped cover that move and security.

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Here is the contradiction that drove the backlash, and it is documented in court paperwork rather than rumor. The day after conviction, Anthony filed his notice of appeal accompanied by a declaration that he is “a penniless, destitute, and indigent person, too poor to employ counsel to represent me on the appeal” — the standard language for requesting a court-appointed lawyer at taxpayer expense. This from a defendant whose family had publicly raised more than $500,000 earmarked for his legal defense, and whose mother told reporters in April that the family had gotten access to roughly $350,000 of it.

There are lawful explanations — and the site will not assert that the filing was fraudulent, because no court or auditor has found that. Trial-defense fees, a year of $3,500-a-month rent, and private security can plausibly consume a fund of this size; indigency for an appeal is assessed on present assets, not on money already spent. The family’s position, voiced through defense attorney Mike Howard, was blunt: “This family needs to be able to survive… Security details and criminal defense are not cheap.” What we can state cleanly is the optics and the open question: a high-dollar public fund, a sworn indigency claim days apart, and no public ledger reconciling the two. Whether donors who gave for a “legal defense” got what they paid for is, fairly, contested.

Lost in the money fight is the family that did not run a fundraiser. Austin Metcalf was 17, an 11th-grader at Frisco Memorial, stabbed in front of his twin brother, Hunter. At sentencing, Hunter asked Anthony to look him in the eye: “Now I want everything taken from you.” Their mother, Meghan Metcalf, told the convicted teen he was “lucky you got 35 years, because I’ve been given a life sentence without my son.” Their father, Jeff Metcalf — who had publicly spoken of forgiveness for more than a year — said afterward: “Forgiveness was not for him. Forgiveness was for me.” The morning after the verdict, he said, felt like “one million pounds” lifted.

The case also drew explicitly political commentary, which is itself part of the public record. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX)argued publicly after the verdict that the knife used was not “a deadly weapon” — a contention the jury, having heard the medical examiner, plainly rejected. The activist group Next Generation Action Network said it was “profoundly disappointed” and would “continue to fight.” A new fundraising effort has reportedly emerged through a family spokesperson even as the original GiveSendGo page came down. The verdict settled the killing; it settled none of the argument around it.

Strip away the heat and a single accountability question remains, and it is a legitimate one: when tens of thousands of strangers give to a fund labeled “legal defense,” what are they owed in return? Crowdfunding platforms like GiveSendGo are not escrow agents; they do not generally publish line-item ledgers, and donations to a personal cause are gifts, not contracts. A donor who gives expecting their money to pay a trial lawyer has little recourse if it pays rent and security instead — both of which were, in this case, listed among the campaign’s stated purposes from the start. The expectation gap is real, and it is structural, not unique to this family.

That is why the indigency filing landed so hard. It is one thing for a defense fund to cover living costs during a long pretrial year. It is another for the beneficiary to then tell a court he cannot afford the very thing the fund was named for. No judge has ruled the filing improper; GiveSendGo has refunded or will refund where its policy requires; and the appeal will proceed on its merits. But the episode is a clean illustration of why crowdfunded justice — on the left and the right alike — sits in an accountability blind spot. We will update this page if a court rules on the indigency claim, if the new fundraiser’s purpose is clarified, or if any independent accounting of the original $634,000 emerges.

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