The 84-year-old Kansas City, Missouri, man charged in the shooting of a 16-year-old who mistakenly rang his doorbell has turned himself in. "Andrew Lester ... has surrendered at our Detention Center and is in custody," the Clay County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Tuesday. "He is in the booking process right now." Lester faces felony charges of assault in the first degree and armed criminal action in connection with the Thursday night shooting of Ralph Yarl, 16, who was shot through a glass door after arriving at the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers. The shooting happened about 10pm on Thursday.
His parents had asked the honor student and all-state band member to go to a home on 115th Terrace; he went to 115th Street instead. NBC News reports that while Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson has said there was a racial element to the case—Lester is white and Yarl is Black—the prosecutor's office said Tuesday that a hate-crime charge will not be filed because it is a lesser degree of felony. The AP reports first-degree assault carries a sentence of up to life in prison. As Yarl recovers at home after being shot in the forehead and arm, his mother, Cleo Nagbe, appeared on CBS Mornings.
She told Gayle King. "Ralph is doing considerably well." He is "able to communicate mostly when he feels like it, 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," she said. (Legal experts are expecting Lester's lawyers to claim self-defense under Missouri’s "Stand Your Ground" law.)
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