A year ago, 17-year-old Austin Metcalf was brutally stabbed to death at a track meet in Frisco, Texas.

17-year-old Karmelo Anthony, a peer from another school, was charged with the crime and his trial is scheduled for June of this year.

I don’t know what it was about this particular incident that grieved me so much. The death of any child is a tragedy. But this one hit me hard.

Perhaps it was because my oldest daughter had just started her first middle school track season when the Metcalf killing happened.

I never knew she had any desire to pursue track, but she came home one day last spring and told me she was going to throw discus.

“Okay, sure,” I replied. I suspected her interest had more to do with her friends joining the track team than this particular field sport, but I wanted to support this new endeavor.

I made a mental note to watch a YouTube video to learn more about discus…

When I dropped her off at the first meet last March, I felt a bit uneasy. It was a combined middle school and high school meet and the stadium was filled with hundreds of competitors and hundreds of spectators. Team tents lined the entire stadium fence line, and nearly every seat in the bleacher was filled. Many of the athletes were 17 or 18-years-old. My daughter was only eleven at the time. This was a new, daunting world.

If you aren’t familiar with track and field meets, there are usually many schools competing, and the athletes hang out under team pop-up tents between events for rest, shade, and snacks since competition often lasts for five or six hours.

Due to other kid activities that day, I was unable to stay for the whole meet. I left my daughter in the hands of coaches and a few parent chaperones, trusting that they could supervise even with all the chaos and crowds.

My daughter was fine. She threw the discus. And the shotput, too. She had fun. Got a little sunburned.

But there was something slightly overwhelming about leaving her at such a large sporting event all day.

A few weeks later, news of the Metcalf death broke out. You might have missed it, since it got almost zero media coverage. A black boy killing a white boy isn’t the preferred headline these days…

When I read about this story, my stomach lurched.

A huge track meet with lots of kids from different schools. Sitting in tents with minimal parent or coach supervision. The exact sporting environment my sweet, young daughter had just joined.

You can read online the limited details about the altercation that led to Metcalf’s death. I pray the truth will be discovered in court and justice will be delivered.

If the story from multiple witnesses is true, it goes like this: Karmelo Anthony was from a different school and decided to sit under the Memorial High School tent, where twin brothers, Hunter and Austin Metcalf, were sitting with their teammates. Hunter first told Karmelo to leave the tent, as Karmelo was from a different school and didn’t belong there. Then, Austin stepped in and repeated the command to leave. Karmelo apparently taunted, “Touch me and see what happens” as he pulled a knife from his backpack and fatally stabbed Austin in the heart.

The online jury of peers will quibble over why Karmelo stopped in the wrong tent or whether he got pushed. They will discuss skin color, the defendant’s speedy bail, and whether his claim of “self-defense” will hold up in the courts.

But as a mom with a young daughter, I always find track meets to be too big, unregulated, and unpredictable, and this is what I can’t stop thinking….

No matter what words were exchanged or how hard it was raining or who shoved who, there were two brothers willing to step up to protect the kids in their own tent.

Because if some sketchy teenage boy shows up to my daughter’s track meet with a knife in his bag and murder in his heart, I pray to God some brave 17-year-old boy will risk his own life to make the killer leave.