Ralph Yarl shooting: 84-year-old shooter expected to be arraigned in court after posting bail
Rachel Schilke
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The shooter of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl will be arraigned in court on Wednesday afternoon after he opened fire on the teenager when he arrived at the wrong house to pick up his younger siblings.
Andrew Lester, 84, will be arraigned on charges of assault in the first degree, a felony that carries up to a life sentence. Lester was also charged with armed criminal action, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
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A warrant was issued for Lester’s arrest when his charges were announced on Monday. He turned himself in on Tuesday and posted $200,000 in bail. No attorney for Lester has been listed yet.
Lester is accused of shooting Yarl when the teenager arrived at Lester’s home by mistake on April 13. Yarl was supposed to pick up his siblings from 115th Terrace. Instead, he went to 115th Street, where Lester lived. Lester reportedly answered the door when Yarl knocked or rang the doorbell. He then allegedly shot Yarl once in the head and shot him again after he fell onto the ground. Yarl was shot just above the left eye and in the upper right arm.
Many civil rights activists and community members have decried the incident as a hate crime. Clay County Prosecutor Zachary Thompson said, “There was a racial component to the case,” but that assault in the first degree is a higher-level crime that can result in a steeper sentence.
The elderly man told police he saw a black male he didn’t know pulling on the exterior storm door handle and that he thought his home was being broken into. Yarl did not cross the threshold of Lester’s home.
Lester allegedly used a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver to shoot Yarl through a glass door, according to a probable cause statement by police.
Lee Merritt, attorney for the Yarl family, said the case should be qualified as a hate crime.
“Ralph Yarl was shot because he was armed with nothing … other than his Black skin,” he said via CBS News.
Merritt said the family is angry that police held Lester for only two hours after the shooting when, legally, he could have been held for 24 hours.
“If they would have held him for 24 hours, they would have held him long enough to get the statement from the kid with a bullet in his brain,” Merritt said. “They got the statement the very next day.”
Yarl sustained gunshot wounds to the head above the left eye and in the upper right arm. The bullet in his head remained lodged for 12 hours before he underwent surgery over the weekend. He walked out of the hospital on Sunday, his father and mother said.
Cleo Nagbe, Yarl’s mother, told CBS News in an interview that her son is in good spirits, but the trauma remains evident.
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He’s able to communicate “when he feels like it,” she said, but “mostly he just sits there and stares, and the buckets of tears just rolls down his eyes.”
“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,” Nagbe said.