The Kansas City teenager who was shot in the head after ringing the wrong doorbell in an attempt to pick up his twin brothers is finally speaking out.
ABC News Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts spoke with 16-year-old Ralph Yarl and his mother, Cleo Nagbe, about the grisly encounter with 84-year-old Andrew D. Lester, the white transgressor.
Yarl arrived at Lester’s residence on April 13, 2023, believing the 84-year-old’s N.E. 115th Street address belonged to the friend his siblings were with. But N.E. 115th Terrace was the correct address Yarl needed to be at, a block from Lester’s house.
Yarl rang Lester’s doorbell and waited, noticing the house’s three exterior cameras.
“As far as I know, I didn’t know their family at all,” Yarl clarified. “I had never even seen their friends or their parents before, so maybe this is their house.”
Lester opened the door, and the 16-year-old assumed he was his brothers’ friend’s grandfather.
“He pulls out his gun,” Yarl recalled. “I’m like, ‘Woah.’ So, I back up. He points it at me, so I kind of brace, and I turn my head. Before that, I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way he’s actually gonna shoot, right? The door is even open. He’s going to shoot through his glass door, and glass is going to get everywhere,’ then it happened.”
Lester shot Yarl twice in the head, engendering the 16-year-old to fall on the shattered glass.
The teen recalled Lester spewing only five words before pulling the trigger twice.
“He only said five words, ‘Don’t come here ever again,'” Yarl said.
Yarl managed to get up and run while yelling for help.
Yarl ran door-to-door, pleading for help until a good samaritan heard his screams, News Onyx reported.
James Lynch, 42, had gotten out of the shower that night and was ready to get in bed when he heard Yarl’s cries for help, screaming he had been shot.
Lynch sprung into action and used his Eagle Scout training to aid the 16-year-old who hadn’t experienced much of life yet.
“I thought he was dead,” Lynch told NBC News. “No one deserves to lay there like that. He hasn’t even begun to live his life yet. He didn’t deserve to get shot.”
Nagbe, Yarl’s mother, assumed car troubles kept her son out longer than expected.
“I was worried already that maybe he had gotten a flat tire or something, and then we got a call from a strange number. It was the police, stating that they had him,” Nagbe said.
Although Yarl was alert when his family got to the hospital, Nagbe said it wasn’t a “pleasant sight.”
It took Yarl ten weeks to recover physically, but the mental and emotional scars remain.
“You’re looking at a kid who took the SAT when he was in the eighth grade, and now his brain has slowed,” Nagbe said. “So, physically, he looks fine, but there’s a lot that has been taken from him.”
Per a News Onyx report, it took four days for authorities to charge Lester with first-degree assault and armed criminal action for shooting Yarl.
The Yarl family’s attorney, Lee Merritt, said race plays a significant role in the case and could make things difficult.
“In cases where there’s a white man and a Black child, I’ve seen over and over again the criminal justice system contorts itself out of shape to find a way to justify the shooting,” Merritt said.
