Ralph Yarl, a Kansas City teenager shot in the head and arm allegedly by an elderly homeowner after going to the wrong house to pick up his 11-year-old twin brothers, is speaking out for the first time.
During an interview aired on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Tuesday, the now 17-year-old Yarl sat alongside his mother and recounted to anchor Robin Roberts how on April 13, he went into the driveway, walked up the steps and rang the doorbell and saw “three different cameras, like one looking at the driveway, one on the porch” of the home of 84-year-old Andrew Lester.
“As far as I know, I didn’t know their family at all. Like, I had never even seen their friends or their parents before so maybe, oh well this is their house,” Yarl said of his brothers’ friends.
The teen said he mistakenly went to N.E. 115th Street, instead of getting his siblings from N.E. 115th Terrace – located just a block away.
Protesters attend a rally for Black teen Ralph Yarl in front of U.S. District Court on April 18, 2023 in Kansas City, Missouri. The 16-year-old Yarl was shot by an 84-year-old White homeowner after going to the wrong house. (Chase Castor/Getty Images)
“He only said five words. ‘Don’t come here ever again,’ Yarl said of Lester, who the teen said he never met before.
Lester has pleaded not guilty to first-degree assault and armed criminal action in the April 13 shooting.
The 84-year-old admitted that he shot Yarl through the door without warning because he was “scared to death” he was about to be robbed by the person standing at his door.
Yarl’s mother, Cleo Nagbe, said on “Good Morning America” that she had been worried that her son got a flat tire, but that she then got a call from police telling her about the shooting, and she headed to the hospital. He was partially alert, but it was traumatizing, she said.
Ten weeks later, Yarl is physically recovered but said that he has headaches and trouble sleeping and that sometimes his mind is just foggy.
Sixteen-year-old Kansas City high school student Ralph Yarl was shot on the front porch of this home when went to the house by mistake in an attempt to pick up his twin siblings. (Christopher Smith/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“You’re looking at a kid that took the SAT when he was in eighth grade – and now his brain is slowed,” Nagbe told Roberts. “So physically he looks fine. But there’s a lot that has been taken from him.” Yarl said he is seeing a therapist and hopes to continue his recovery by focusing on his passions for chemical engineering and for music.