Details continue to emerge about the near-fatal shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in Kansas City, Missouri last Thursday (April 13). We now know what the gunman said to him immediately before opening fire.
Yarl’s mother asked him to pick up his 11-year-old twin brothers from a friend’s home in Kansas City. He mistakenly went to the wrong address and rang the doorbell shortly before 10 p.m. When an elderly white man answered the door, he wasted no time in telling the Black teen what he thought.
“Whoever was inside took a little longer than he anticipated to respond, and so he just waited at the door,” the family’s attorney, Lee Merritt, told NBC News. “He heard rustling around going on in the house and then finally the door was open. And he was confronted by a man who told him, ‘Don’t come back around here,’ and then he immediately fired his weapon.”
The homeowner shot the teenager in the head, cracking his skull and leaving him with a critical brain injury. After the man fired the first shot, Yarl lay on the ground totally still. He fired his gun a second time and hit the accomplished clarinetist in his right arm.
The victim’s aunt, Faith Spoonmore, recounted to NBC how confused her nephew is by the whole situation. “We’ll remind him like, ‘Ralph, you’re alive, buddy.’ And then he has the times where he’s like, ‘Why? I did nothing wrong. Why? I did nothing wrong.’ And he just cannot understand why,” she lamented. “So it’s waves. He goes through waves.”
According to Merritt, the neighborhood where the shooting happened is predominantly white and conservative, and is “commonly referred to among locals as ‘God’s country.'”
“We’ve heard reports from Black people who live in the neighborhood, who visit the neighborhood, that there seems to be a standing hostility towards Black presence in that community,” he added.
Yarl was released from the hospital today (April 17) and is recovering at home with his family. The man who shot him was taken into custody after the incident but was released as the police investigation continues.