‘Not going to define him’: Ralph Yarl’s father worries about moving on from shooting

Paul Yarl had been prepping to have the talk with his son soon, now that he was driving.

He planned to walk 16-year-old Ralph Yarl through how to stay safe and cautious during traffic stops. He’d tell him about his own experiences with mistaken identity or prejudices pointed at him, as a Black man driving in America.

“That talk was coming until this happened,” Yarl said nearly two weeks after Ralph, a Staley High School junior, was shot in the head and arm by a Kansas City homeowner after mistakenly going to the wrong address in the Northland while trying to pick his younger brothers up from their friend’s house.

On April 13, Yarl rang the doorbell at the home of an 84-year-old man in the 1100 block of Northeast 115th Street, where he thought he was picking up his twin brothers. Yarl had intended to go to a home one street over, on Northeast 115th Terrace.

Andrew Lester, the white homeowner accused of shooting Yarl, was charged four days later with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. Lester told police he saw Yarl through the glass front door and “was scared to death.”

Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson previously said there was a “racial component” to the shooting, but didn’t elaborate

Lee Merritt, a civil rights attorney representing the Yarl family, said the teenager was shot “because he was armed with nothing other than his Black skin.”

Now, Yarl’s talk with his son will be different than he intended, once it comes.

Yarl said he also wants to emphasize to his son that not everyone is bad. That he can still trust his neighbors. That being shot by a stranger is out of the ordinary.

He wants his son to know that what happened to him doesn’t define him, nor does it define the rest of humanity. He wants him to know that none of this was his fault.

Yarl wants people to know about his son’s life before Ralph’s name became the latest added to an ever-growing list of reasons why Black bodies aren’t always safe in the United States.

An early love of music

When Yarl was about his son’s age, he moved from Liberia to the United States with his father, who worked for the embassy.

He went on to earn a degree in Wisconsin, then landed a full-time job doing information technology work in Kansas City in 2001. Yarl met Ralph’s mother, Cleo Nagbe, through a mutual friend while he was in Missouri and she was finishing up a degree in Staten Island. Within a year they were married, and she moved to KC. Ralph came along shortly after.

One Sunday morning in May, just before Mother’s Day, the young couple was headed to church when Nagbe’s water broke. Yarl rerouted the car to the hospital.

Ralph’s birth was challenging and ended in a c-section because he was such a big baby, Yarl said. But finally, he was able to look down at his son, who he named after himself and his father before him. Nagbe chose the middle name Ralph, which has Christian roots, Yarl said. That was the name that stuck.

Ralph’s early years were spent between church and community, his father said.

Yarl came to be a leader in the Liberian Community Organization of Kansas and Missouri, one of the first organizations he linked up with after moving to KC. He and his wife took Ralph to the group’s picnics and community events where he met other kids with similar family roots.

But it was Ralph’s involvement in their church community, and his mother’s encouragement, that helped him embrace music from a young age, Yarl said. It started with singing.

Ralph was part of the youth choir, and each summer at Vacation Bible School, Ralph gravitated toward anything involving music. Despite his shyness, he took “every chance he had” to perform, his father said.

Over time, he gravitated toward instruments, like a portable electric piano they had at home. As he got older, Yarl remembers his son starting to carry around a “briefcase” which always had whichever instrument he was learning inside of it. He currently plays the bass clarinet, and has received statewide honors for his musical abilities.

But Ralph was also a “typical boy who liked his trucks,” Yarl said.

He remembers accompanying his wife and son on road trips, including to Lake of the Ozarks and the Wisconsin Dells. They could hear Ralph in the backseat, eagerly pointing out every truck and its color as they whizzed by on the interstate.

Ralph was their only child until he was in elementary school, when his twin brothers — now 11 — were born. Up until then, he liked to play video games, but his attention soon focused on learning to share his parents with his siblings, Yarl said.

As they made Kansas City their home, the family took outings to the World War I Memorial, and Crown Center, visiting Hallmark, where Paul worked for 14 years as a programmer. They made stops at the aquarium and LEGOLAND when they could.

Always a favorite student

A handful of years ago, Ralph was accepted into the school’s gifted program, Yarl said, recalling how Ralph would regale him with stories of what he was learning. He remembers when his son eagerly spoke about the wonders of a 3D printer, for example.

“That was way beyond what I could understand,” Yarl said. “I was impressed.”

He was proud of him. He is proud of him.

At home, Ralph has always been pretty quiet.

“If you don’t speak to him, if you don’t make him talk, he will probably not bother because there’s always something that’s keeping him busy,” Yarl said, be it homework, a good book or the Xbox Live.

Never once, Yarl said, has he received a call from anyone at school saying that Ralph needed improvement.

“There was never a trouble with his name on it,” he said.

Christopher Wilson, a teacher at Hawthorn Elementary School, had Ralph in 3rd grade, from 2014 to 2015. He said as much as teachers try not to pick favorites, Ralph remains one of the best students he’s had.

Even as a young kid, Ralph was sweet-natured and, though shy, he was also sharp and inquisitive.

“He might not always talk a lot, but just this intelligence and his creative and critical thinking would come out in his learning,” Wilson said.

At the end of the year in Wilson’s class, the students vote on a peer to receive the citizenship award. That year, Ralph was chosen. Wilson wasn’t surprised.

He knew it early on: “This kid has a lot of potential. He’ll be going places.”

Amy Ritter has photos from her years of teaching saved as tiny jpegs on her desktop. It wasn’t hard for her to spot Ralph in the sea of pixels.

“His smile you could see and recognize from miles away,” said Ritter, who was Ralph’s fifth grade teacher at Hawthorn Elementary, back when she was known as Ms. Andruska.

He was quiet in her class, but when he spoke, the whole class listened, she said.

“Everything was just a bright experience in his life,” Ritter said. “Everything he spoke about was always positive.”

Ralph was extremely ambitious, even as a 5th grader. She said of all her students, he always wanted to learn more and push himself to the next level. And he was humble, and attribute Ritter said she also recognized quickly in his parents.

She remembered that Ralph would get a kick out of being on a first-name basis with the school librarians. He checked out books so frequently that they didn’t need to ask for his name.

He also did a lot of writing in her class. In one assignment, he argued in favor of seatbelts on school buses and “why it’s super dangerous for kids” to go without them.

In another writing assignment, he detailed a trip he took with his family to Washington, D.C. Ritter said the eagerness in which Ralph wrote about U.S. history and how it affects his own life was reminiscent of an old soul. She said it also spoke to how Ralph was raised to learn about life and about the world.

As the trip came to an end, Ralph wrote: “once we packed everything, we prayed, and we started driving.”

She found this mental image of Ralph and his family powerful, describing them as “just absolutely impeccable” and the kindest individuals.

Ritter, who at the time didn’t have children, remembered thinking that if she had kids in the future, she wanted them to have the same characteristics as Ralph.

“His passion for life, his intelligence …. He is kind to every single person, it didn’t matter who it was or what was going on, he had a positive attitude. I mean, genuinely kind, and that’s hard to come by,” she said.

Ritter has been a teacher for 14 years; hundreds of students have passed through her classroom.

“When you meet kids like Ralph and you recognize that they’re your future, you just know everything is going to be OK.”

Nicole Bryan, 17, one of Yarl’s classmates and friends, said she met Yarl in seventh grade. They’re both in the band where he plays bass clarinet and she plays bassoon. When they first met, he corrected her on her instrument, and helped her become better. He still pushes her to achieve her best, Nicole said.

She said Yarl has talked about studying chemical engineering in college. He’s a whiz at science and math, but his passion is music, Nicole said. He’s won numerous awards for his academics and his musical talent, she said.

In the days after the shooting, Meara Mitchell, a current teacher of Yarl’s who’s known him for several years, described him as a “stellar human-being” with a “quiet fortitude.”

Of her many students, Yarl’s work ethic and love and kindness for others makes him stand out. He’s dutiful to his family, she said, and he impressed her every day in his academics and his interactions with his peers.

“He is the utmost example of how you want a young man to carry himself in this world,” she said.

Becoming a young man

In 2017, the senior Yarl moved to Maryland where some of his relatives remain. More recently, he moved again, this time to Indianapolis. But Yarl would come back to visit sporadically.

Yarl said he’s never opened up to Ralph about why he left, but he’d promised himself this would be the year.

On a recent trip, before Ralph was shot, Yarl had come back and noticed how tall he’d gotten. Though still very much a child, and not tall by comparison with most adults, Ralph now stands 5-feet-8-inches tall.

“He’s taller than me now … I said ‘wow,’” Yarl recalled.

Before the shooting, “(Ralph) was making so much progress as a young man,” Yarls said.

Ralph had just started driving recently, setting an example for some of his peers who were less eager to learn.

“Ralph is a teenager, all teenagers are teenagers,” Nagbe, Ralph’s mother, said in an interview with CBS. “No teenager is a perfect teenager, but I’ll tell you what Ralph and I will argue about ... ‘Ralph can you put the sheet music down and do your English homework?’”

English is his only non-college level course, so Ralph often gets bored of it, Nagbe said.

She said he’s twice received letters from Yale asking him to apply.

‘He just went to pick up his siblings’

While Yarl and Ralph’s mother are now separated, he said they’re on the same team.

It’s why, when she texted him that there was an emergency on that April evening, he called and then immediately got on the road. On the frantic drive, a small part of Yarl’s mind, in its race for answers, wondered if Ralph did or said something he shouldn’t have. He was trying to reconcile what might have caused someone to even think of shooting his son.

But then he thought about how, in all of Ralph’s upbringing, he used to think something was wrong because his oldest child never gave him a headache. He was never in trouble.

Yarl soon learned the truth: “He just went to pick up his siblings.”

Since the shooting, Ralph has had two surgeries and remains at home recovering with the help of his mother, who is a registered nurse.

Every doctor says he’s making good progress, but they also encourage the family to be patient.

“Obviously, the healing process is going to come in different forms and shapes,” Yarl said. “It’s going to take time, but I don’t think it’s going to take forever.”

The whole family is seeing a psychologist, a Black woman, to navigate this trauma and their future.

Yarl is still hit by waves of sadness, anger and confusion. He worries about the PTSD and the trauma his son will face. The bad memories and bad thoughts.

Meanwhile, Ralph is still confused and suffering, family said.

However, Ralph is starting to have more good days than bad days, Ralph’s aunt, Faith Spoonmore, said on Instagram over the weekend. Despite experiencing debilitating headaches, he doesn’t complain much, she said. He’s even hoping to start playing the bass clarinet again soon.

“Look at all these people who are loving to you, buddy, I don’t even know them, but they all love you,” Spoonmore told reporters after charges were announced.

Ralph voiced that he didn’t understand why people were making such a big deal. Spoonmore said that’s just who he is.

Yarl at the very least wants an apology for his son.

“The shooter put him through that. The shooter is responsible for bringing that pain, and it could be a lifetime of pain, and I think the shooter should apologize,” he said, later adding: “The least the person who caused that suffering can do is to help you heal.”

At only 16, Ralph’s name has been spoken across the country, forced to the forefront of a national outcry for change.

Soon, Ralph will be 17. He’s been invited to the White House.

Yarl feels deep down that the shooting won’t always be the first search result when people Google Ralph’s name.

“He’s going to recover and he’s going to do great things,” he said. “Knowing who he is, that incident is not going to define him for the rest of his life.”

The Star’s Glenn E. Rice contributed.