A Black teenager went to the wrong house to pick up his siblings. He was shot.
Kansas City police are investigating the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager who was shot by a homeowner last week after going to the wrong house to pick up his two younger brothers. Police have said they’re gathering information in order to present the case to a prosecutor, who’ll decide whether to press charges. Though details are still developing as the investigation unfolds, the shooting has sparked concerns that race played a role in the attack and prompted new scrutiny of Missouri’s stand-your-ground law.
Thus far, local officials haven’t released any information about the shooter. However, according to Yarl’s attorneys, the teen was shot in the head and arm by an unidentified white male after he rang the home’s doorbell. The circumstances of the attack have led to concerns on the part of residents and protesters who gathered in Kansas City over the weekend that the shooting was racially motivated. Since the shooting, Yarl’s family has also retained the services of two of the US’s most prominent civil rights attorneys, Lee Merritt and Ben Crump.
“You can’t just shoot people without having justification when somebody comes knocking on your door and knocking on your door is not justification. This guy should be charged,” said Crump. “It is inescapable not to acknowledge the racial dynamics at play,” he added.
Police have said there’s “no indication” the shooting was racially motivated at this time, though the investigation is ongoing. “I do recognize the racial components of this case,” police chief Stacey Graves said Sunday.
In addition to questions about the rationale behind the shooting, protesters have expressed frustration with the pace of the investigation and spent much of the weekend’s demonstrations calling for prosecutors to take action, which they have not yet done.
Police held the shooter for 24 hours, after which they had to either charge or release them. Graves has said they opted to release the shooter because officers didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges, stating the department still needed to obtain “a formal statement from the victim, forensic evidence and compile additional information for a case file to presented.” Law enforcement said they’re also investigating stand-your-ground laws, and whether they offer protections for the shooter’s actions.
Yarl’s shooting comes amid heightened scrutiny of violence against Black Americans following numerous killings and brutality at the hands of police and other individuals. Frustration has built amid new attention on how the justice system has dealt with violence toward Black people in the past, with perpetrators often facing minimal or no consequences. The shooting also occurred as the US is reeling from multiple mass shootings and growing calls for the need for more restrictions on firearms.
Yarl is a junior in high school. He’s known for his love for music and engineering, writes his aunt Faith Spoonmore in a GoFundMe page that was started to address his medical bills. He plays the bass clarinet in his school jazz band, competes on the science olympiad team, and hopes to go to Texas A&M to study chemical engineering, according to his aunt.
“Life looks a lot different right now,” Spoonmore writes. “Even though he is doing well physically, he has a long road ahead mentally and emotionally. The trauma that he has to endure and survive is unimaginable.”
What we know about the shooting
The shooting took place last Thursday in Kansas City’s Northland neighborhood. Yarl was asked to pick up his twin brothers from a friend’s house, but accidentally went to 115th Street instead of 115th Terrace, which was just a block away.
According to Spoonmore’s post, the homeowner opened the door after Yarl rang the doorbell and shot him in the head. After Yarl fell to the ground, the homeowner allegedly shot him again. Spoonmore says Yarl sought help from neighboring houses and had to go to three places before finding someone who came to his aid.
Police said they responded to a call about Yarl’s injuries around 10 pm local time on Thursday. They said then that Yarl experienced a life-threatening injury but was in stable condition. Yarl is “alive and recovering,” his attorneys posted in a statement on Sunday.
Hundreds of people gathered in Kansas City to protest this weekend, demonstrating to support Yarl and to call for prosecutors to press charges against the shooter. “I realize that justice doesn’t come overnight, but that fact that there is a kid in the hospital and everything I read says not even a charge has been done, that concerns me,” Karen Allman, a neighborhood resident, told the local news network KSHB.
Police have said they’re in the process of gathering more information and that it often takes more than 24 hours to collect evidence in cases like this one. They note, too, that the investigation is still in progress. “I understand the concern we are receiving from the community,” Graves said at a press briefing.
The shooting has raised questions about race and gun laws
Yarl’s shooting has ignited concern about possible racial motivations in the attack, as well as questions of whether implicit biases have affected the way law enforcement has treated the case.
“How do you protect a Black kid?” Yarl family friend Patience Gaye told the Kansas City Star. “We left our countries because we don’t want to be killed. That’s why we left. They came to America for a better life. How is this a better life?” According to the Star, Yarl’s parents immigrated to the US in order to flee violence in Liberia.
The shooting has taken place following police killings of Black men and boys, including 29-year-old Tyre Nichols in Memphis and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, as well as the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black jogger, by two white men in Georgia.
Civil rights advocates believe the investigations in a number of these cases were slow-walked due to systemic racism, and some fear that’s now happening again. In Arbery’s case, for example, local officials did not arrest the two attackers for weeks, and the investigation cycled through prosecutors. Ultimately, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had to take over the case. Additionally, Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr wound up requesting a federal DOJ investigation of local prosecutors’ handling of their investigations. Arbery’s killers were indicted on murder charges four months after he died.
Yarl’s case is also unfolding amid a nationwide conversation about the ubiquity of guns and the relatively lax gun laws many states have. Missouri is one of at least 23 states with a stand-your-ground law, under which a “would-be shooter defending life or property does not have to retreat before taking violent action,” according to NBC News.
Oxford University researcher Michelle Degli Esposti has previously found links between the passage of state-level stand-your-ground laws and increased homicides. Between 1999 and 2017, the time frame that Esposti studied, Missouri in particular was one of the places with the highest increase in gun homicides after the passage of a stand-your-ground law. In that period, gun homicides increased 31 percent in the state. A stand-your-ground law complicated the investigation of Arbery’s case and has been used as defense against the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012.
The recent spike in gun violence has spurred a push to reevaluate gun laws in different states, a conversation that Yarl’s shooting could reignite as well.
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