In June 2026, a video circulated online that claimed police arrested a man for urinating on the grave of Austin Metcalf, a high school student murdered during a track meet in Frisco, Texas, in April 2025.
On June 10, 2026, a jury convicted Karmelo Anthony, now 19, of Metcalf's murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. Anthony appealed the conviction.
One TikTok user shared a video (archived) that claimed police had arrested "the man who urinated on 17-year-old Austin Metcalf's grave." The video showed images of at least four different people, two of them women, who appeared to urinate on a flat headstone bearing Metcalf's name.
@rhondapetersen5824 #foryou #fyp #usa #tiktok #news ♬ original sound - rhondapetersen5824
The video also circulated on X (archived), Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived). Snopes readers wrote in, asking whether the video's claim was true.
We found no evidence that police in Little Elm, Texas, where Metcalf is buried, arrested anyone for urinating on his grave.
The video that circulated on social media claimed "authorities" had launched an investigation and arrested one man on the basis of a video of him urinating on Metcalf's grave. Online searches found no such video, which would have circulated widely on social media if it existed. It was not clear what footage showing an apparent arrest in the video depicted.
The video that shared the claim about the alleged arrest referenced "reports" about the event. Searches of Google, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo (archived, archived, archived) did not return reports from credible news outlets that police arrested anyone for urinating on Metcalf's grave. Due to the extensive media coverage of Anthony's murder trial, such an arrest would have been widely reported.
In short, we found nothing to support the claim that anyone had been arrested for urinating on Metcalf's grave. Therefore we rate this claim false.
Snopes contacted the Little Elm Police Department to ask whether it had opened investigations or carried out arrests of one or more people suspected of urinating on Metcalf's grave and await a reply.
The video that circulated on social media contained four images of people appearing to urinate on Metcalf's grave, claiming they imitated the man who police had allegedly arrested. The New York Post reported on these and additional images, calling them "doctored."
(@babyjunglerich and @gmduke2, accessed via Instagram)
Sightengine and Hive Moderation, two online artificial intelligence detectors, found three images (archived, archived, archived) that remained online at the time of this writing that appeared to show people urinating on Metcalf's grave highly likely to have been edited or generated using AI. (Such detectors are not always fully reliable and should not be relied upon alone to judge whether an image is fake.)
In addition to these assessments, the three images that Snopes viewed were obviously fake as evidenced by stark lighting differences between the people who appeared to be urinating on Metcalf's grave and their surroundings, making them look pasted in. One of the fake images was based on an existing photo on that person's profile. Another fake image showed a woman with an anatomically impossible stream of urine.
Given that the images analyzed above were fake, we found no evidence that the people in those images had actually urinated on Metcalf's grave.
Despite being fake, the images reignited discourse around Anthony's case that amplified its racial elements. Metcalf was white and Anthony is Black. According to The Associated Press, Metcalf's father previously denounced those who sought to stoke racial divisions over his son's death. The AP also reported that lawyers for the defense and prosecution told jurors the case had nothing to do with race.
For further reading, Snopes has previously investigated other claims to do with Metcalf's murder and Anthony's case.