A Kansas City teenager who survived being shot in the head after ringing the doorbell at a mistaken address participated in a Memorial Day walk and run to raise money for traumatic brain injury victims, marking his first major public appearance since the attack.
Ralph Yarl, 17, did not speak publicly at Monday morning’s Going the Distance for Brain Injury gathering, where he walked 1.5 miles (2.4km) alongside his mother after weeks of therapy. But his mom, Cleo Nagbe, gave a speech to participants and talked to reporters about how he was recovering from the shooting.
“When you get a traumatic brain injury, everybody expects you to look one way, feel one way or act one way, but it’s not that way,” Nagbe said during her talk, according to ABC News. “And everybody’s asking me, ‘Have you gone back to work yet, has Ralph gone back to school yet?’ That’s not the case. A brain injury is a process, it’s not an event. It takes time.
“Let’s raise more awareness to stop the things that cause brain injuries and should not be causing it, especially gun violence.”
Separately, in an interview with KMBC, Nagbe said the most difficult part about the walk for her son was being around a large crowd for the first time since he had been shot.
“It was mostly the anxiety for him – socially it’s still hard for him,” Nagbe told the local television news station. “So I’m glad he was able to overcome this – I pray that he will be able to overcome most of his social hurdles after doing this.”
Yarl was thrust into the national conscience on 13 April, when he was still 16 and rang the doorbell at the home of 84-year-old Andrew Lester. The teen was going to pick up his twin younger brothers but ended up at Lester’s place after inadvertently going to the wrong home.
Lester shot Yarl in the head and arm. As Yarl ran away for help, he recalled hearing Lester shout: “Don’t come around here,” according to a statement which he gave police after going to a hospital.
Authorities have since charged Lester with assault in the first degree – Missouri’s term for attempted murder – and armed criminal action. He has posted a $200,000 bond to be out of custody pending the resolution of the case against him.
Lester could receive life imprisonment if ultimately convicted of assault in the first degree and up to 15 years if eventually found guilty of armed criminal action.
Meanwhile, Yarl’s aunt, Faith Spoonmore, has said that he has been living with her since the shooting. In an interview with ABC News on Friday, Spoonmore said that her nephew has not been ready to return to his home, which is in the neighborhood where he was shot. He has also been grappling with migraines, making it difficult for him to play his favorite musical instruments – the clarinet and the bassoon.
“[It] is so unfortunate because he had a lot of great memories,” Spoonore told ABC News.
An online fundraiser meant to support Yarl’s physical and emotional recovery from his shooting has generated more than $3.4m from more than 92,000 separate donors.
Yarl was nearly killed amid a spate of shootings across the US which involved property owners firing guns at young people who approached them either by mistake or for an innocent reason. Taken together, the cases ignited calls in some quarters for lawmakers to restrict public access to guns and to reform laws which make firearms owners believe they can use their weapons with impunity.
The cases also cast a worldwide spotlight on the culture of guns in the US, where there had been more than 260 mass shootings so far this year as of Tuesday, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are wounded or killed. More than 20 shootings reported across the US during the Memorial Day weekend fit that definition, including one Monday on a beach in Hollywood, Florida, that left nine people injured.
At least 16 people were slain in the mass shootings reported across the country during this year’s Memorial Day weekend, the archive’s records show.
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