A Black teenager who was shot by an elderly white man after ringing the wrong doorbell when picking up his siblings has secured a spot on Missouri’s all-state band, less than a year after suffering a traumatic brain injury from the shooting.
Ralph Yarl, who is 17, was shot in the head and arm by Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old homeowner in Kansas City, Missouri, in April last year after going to the wrong house to pick up his twin brothers. The case reignited debate in the US over race and gun violence issues.
Yarl has now been selected to play second chair bass clarinet for Missouri’s all-state band, North Kansas city schools has announced. Yarl, who also plays the saxophone, has previously spoken of how music helped him during his recovery from the shooting. He will perform at the Missouri Music Educators Association annual conference in Lake of the Ozarks this month, according to a North Kansas City Schools Facebook post.
Just 16 years old when he went to pick up his brothers from a friend’s house, which he’d never been to before, Yarl mistakenly rang the doorbell at Lester’s premises a block away. Lester, a retired aircraft mechanic, then came to the door and, according to Yarl, said, “Don’t come here ever again.”
“I hear the door open. I see this old man, and I’m assuming, ‘Oh, this must be like their grandpa,’ and then he pulls out his gun, and I’m like, whoa!” Yarl told ABC News.
“So I back up. He points it at me. So I kind of, like, brace and I turn my head. I’m thinking there’s no way he’s actually going to shoot, right? The door [isn’t] even open. He’s going to shoot through his glass door and glass is going get everywhere? And then it happened.”
Yarl said that he was bleeding from his head and tried to seek help from a neighbor across the street, who declined to help. He had to knock on the door of multiple houses before someone opened the door and told him to wait for the police.
The teenager subsequently underwent neurological surgery for the injuries he received. He has said that he suffers lingering effects, saying his “mind is just foggy, like I can’t concentrate on the things that would be easy for me to do”.
Lester told police that he believed someone was attempting to break into his house and that he grabbed a gun to protect himself. Missouri is a “stand your ground” state where people can use deadly force if they reasonably believe they are at risk of violent attack.
In August, a Missouri judge ordered that Lester stand trial for the shooting. At the hearing, several people in the courtroom were wearing shirts that read ‘Justice for Ralph’ and ‘Ringing a doorbell is not a crime’. Lester has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree assault and armed criminal action and was released on a $200,000 bond.
