by Justin Lock
Two tragedies. Two young men dead. Two verdicts. And in both cases, forces eager to turn grief into a weapon.
A jury found Karmelo Anthony guilty of first-degree murder on Tuesday in the stabbing death of Austin Metcalf, a 17-year-old student-athlete killed during a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas in April 2025. In Southampton, England, Vickrum Digwa was convicted of the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old British university student stabbed to death on December 3, 2025. Digwa received a life sentence.
Both cases share something beyond the violence itself: Henry Nowak's family pleaded that his murder not be used to stoke racial division, and the families of both Austin Metcalf and Karmelo Anthony have described their sons as good students who planned to go to college. In both cases, grief has been exploited by bad-faith actors online, by political opportunists, and by those who profit from turning communities against each other.
Not In Our Town stands firmly against any attempts to use these tragedies to further inflame racial, religious, or other forms of conflict. We mourn Austin Metcalf and Henry Nowak. We extend our deepest condolences to both families. And we firmly reject every attempt to weaponize their deaths.
What We Are Watching
Tensions boiled over outside the Frisco courthouse as Karmelo Anthony's trial got underway, with dueling crowds on both sides antagonizing each other as the racially-charged case unfolded. Videos circulating on social media showed heated conflicts between groups, with verbal exchanges that included racial insults. Online, the case has been fed into a machinery of racial grievance that had nothing to do with Austin Metcalf, his family, or the specific facts of his death.
In Britain, extremist and White Nationalist groups are accused of exploiting Henry Nowak's murder to stoke racial tensions, with hundreds of demonstrators gathering outside a Southampton police station, stirred up by far-right activists, clashing with riot police and injuring eleven officers. Despite pleas from Nowak's grieving family to prevent his death from sparking racial division, prominent far-right and populist figures tried to exploit the tragedy.
We have seen this pattern before. We know where it leads. And we know that communities have the power to interrupt it, if they choose to.
What We Believe
We believe that Austin Metcalf's life mattered. We believe that Karmelo Anthony, who was also seventeen years old, deserved a fair trial and a justice system that treated him as a person. We believe those two things are not in conflict.
We believe Henry Nowak deserved help when he was dying. We believe that the police failure in Southampton must be fully investigated and that those responsible must be held accountable. We also believe that a tragedy involving a Sikh perpetrator and a White victim is not a license for anti-Sikh violence, anti-immigrant hatred, or the far-right political agenda that has rushed to claim it.
We believe that every time a community responds to violence with more violence, with scapegoating, with the targeting of an entire people for the actions of one person, the forces of division win. And we believe communities are capable of choosing differently.
A Word About Young People
Both Austin Metcalf and Karmelo Anthony were seventeen years old. Henry Nowak was eighteen. These were not abstractions. They were young people, students, sons, athletes, examples of potential, whose lives were changed or ended by a moment of violence that should not have happened.
We owe young people better than this. We owe them communities where conflict does not escalate to knives. We owe them adults who model accountability, not vengeance. We owe them schools, neighborhoods, and institutions that take the conditions, isolation, fear, hierarchy, and the normalization of aggression seriously, the normalization of aggression that precede violence.
That is not a political statement. It is a basic obligation.
We invite communities across the United States and around the world to use this moment not to deepen division but to build the relationships, practices, and honest conversations that prevent the next tragedy.