Ralph Yarl is ‘just replaying’ Kansas City shooting in his head: mom
Ralph Yarl, the 16-year-old boy who was shot after ringing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City, Missouri, keeps “replaying the situation over and over again” — and can’t stop crying, his mother revealed Tuesday.
Cleo Nagbe, a nurse of nearly 20 years, said she was happy that her son survived the near-deadly encounter with Andrew Lester, 84, who shot the gifted musician in the head and arm last Thursday.
After being released from the hospital days later, Nagbe told CBS Mornings that Yarl communicates “when he feels like it,” but that he usually remains quiet.
“Mostly he just sits there and stares and the buckets of tears just roll down his eyes,” she said.
“You can see that he is just replaying the situation over and over again.
“And that just doesn’t stop my tears either, because when you see your kid just sits there and constantly he just — tears are just rolling from both sides of his eyes, there’s nothing you can say to him.”
She added that his family and a team of medical professionals remain at his side as he recovers.
Nagbe reiterated that her son had been outside Lester’s home Thursday night because he was going to pick up his twin brothers.
The younger siblings were supposed to stay over at a friend’s house for a sleepover, but Nagbe said she was worried about her boys staying out late and instructed Yarl to pick them up by 10 p.m.
Yarl mistakenly went to N.E. 115th Street in Kansas City instead of the nearby N.E. 115th Terrace where his brothers were waiting.
Nagbe suggested that because he didn’t see his brothers come out like they were supposed to, Yarl went up to the house and rang the doorbell.
“While he was standing there, his brothers didn’t run outside, but he got a couple of bullets in his body instead of a couple of twins coming up, out, and giving him a hug,” she said.
Lester has since been charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action, and an arrest warrant has been issued, according to the Clay County Prosecutor’s office.
He told investigators that he was “scared to death” and believed someone was trying to break into his home when he fired at Yarl, who he described as a “black male approximately 6 feet tall pulling on the storm door handle.”
Yarl, however, maintains that he never touched the door and was immediately shot in the head” and fell to the ground before he was then blasted again in the arm.
Yarl claimed Lester warned, “Don’t come around here,” as he fled, fearing he would be shot yet again.
According to the probable cause affidavit, Lester claimed he was defending himself, which would play into Missouri’s “Stand your ground” law.
According to the state’s self-defense law, a person may use physical and deadly force against another if they have a reason to believe that such force is necessary to protect “against death, serious physical injury or any forcible felony.”
Missouri’s “castle doctrine” specifically allows such actions to be used in a person’s home, which will likely play into the case as Lester was inside his house when he fired at Yarl, who was standing outside.
It remains to be seen if Lester will be able to argue that he faced a legitimate threat when Yarl rang his doorbell.
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