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 news of his sentencing, social media users shared an image that purportedly showed Anthony crying in the courtroom.
The image spread on Instagram, Facebook and X. One user wrote: "I wish I could hug him. Life man."
(X user @Honeys_Money1)
However, the above image was not authentic and was created using artificial intelligence tools. As such, we rate this claim as fake.
News coverage confirmed there were no cameras allowed in the courtroom while the case was ongoing. The media relied on courtroom sketches like these released on June 4 and June 9.
The image shows Anthony with long hair, similar to his booking photo from April 2025. However, the courtroom sketches, as well as a mugshot of Anthony released by authorities, showed that he had closely cropped hair at the time of the trial.
A reverse image search on Google found no credible sources sharing the image of Anthony crying. Additionally, ZeroGPT, Sight Engine, and Hive Moderation, tools that detect AI generation, all said that image had a high likelihood of being generated via artificial intelligence. (We should note that such AI detection tools are fallible. We caution people against using them for definitive answers on media's authenticity without additional supporting evidence.)
For further reading, Snopes has published a detailed explanation of AI slop, a term for low-quality content that's easy to create thanks to AI tools. We also looked into claims that Anthony's family used donations to buy a house and a car.