In June 2026, a jury in Texas sentenced 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony to 35 years in prison for fatally stabbing another teenager, Austin Metcalf, at a track meet in April 2025. Amid the news, claims spread that Metcalf's father, Jeff Metcalf, had been photographed alongside the judge who presided over Anthony's trial and the district attorney who oversaw the prosecution.
The photograph in question spread on X, Instagram and Facebook, and showed four men and a woman at a party. One X user wrote: "Yeah, this should be a mistrial due to a conflict of interest. Jeff Metcalf, Judge Roach, and DA Greg Willis all know each other. Karmelo is innocent!"
(Instagram user "therealpoohnana")
While the above photograph does show Jeff Metcalf and appears to be authentic — meaning not created by or edited with artificial intelligence or other digital tools — District Judge John Roach and Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis are not in the image. We were unable to identify the other people in the photograph. As such, we rate this claim as miscaptioned.
Roach has denied any prior relationship to the Metcalf family. Snopes reached out to Willis' office for his response to the rumor and will update this post accordingly.
We looked closely at images and interviews of Jeff Metcalf and found his appearance closely matched that of the man who was second from the left in the photograph, in the gray jacket.
We also looked closely at photographs and footage of Roach and compared them with the men in the above image. We concluded that Roach did not share any similarities with the men in the photograph, as seen below:
(judgeroach.com/Instagram user "therealpoohnana")
Additionally, in a June 11 interview with Dallas television station WFAA, Roach denied knowing the Metcalfs. He said
I wouldn't know Mr. Metcalf prior to this trial if he walked up to me and said hello. I don't know the Metcalfs. I sympathize with the Metcalfs and what they've been through and all, but I don't know them personally, never have.
The interviewer also asked him about "AI images emerging of [Roach] and [the Metcalfs] at a party or drinking together" to which Roach said, "Never happened" (at 5:07):
Photographs and videos of Willis also show no similarities to the men in the image, as seen below:
(LinkedIn user Greg Willis/Instagram user "therealpoohnana")
Using Google's reverse image search tool, we were unable to determine a source for the above image. ZeroGPT and Sight Engine, tools that detect AI generation, said the image had a high likelihood of being real and not generated by AI. (We should note that such AI detection tools are fallible. We caution people against using them for definitive answers on the media's authenticity without additional supporting evidence.)
In sum, Roach and Willis are not in the above photograph, and Roach denies knowing the Metcalf family. We will update this story if we get more information.
For further reading, Snopes has covered an AI-generated image of Anthony crying in the courtroom.