KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Ralph Yarl, the Black teenager who survived being shot in the head after he rang the wrong doorbell nearly a year ago, is only now coming to grips with how the shooting has affected him.
Sometimes, Yarl, 17, turns inward, ignoring phone calls and texts from loved ones. He skipped senior prom because he was afraid people would ask him about the shooting and he wasn’t sure how he would respond. And he acknowledges that his brain doesn’t process dense information the way it once did.
Yarl, who was shot in the head last April 13, when he went to the wrong house in Kansas City to pick up his two younger brothers, has struggled with a seesaw of emotions since that fateful day: anger, hope for the future, sadness and compassion.
“It’s definitely a bumpy journey,” Yarl said in his first in-depth interview about how the shooting has affected him one year later. “Whenever there’s something that goes on that reminds me of what happened … I just have, like, such a negative wave of emotions, like anger, like disgust. It’s always a mix of good and bad days. And I feel like the good days are when I’m able to be around people that help me build myself up.”
Family members said Yarl — who still bears an uneven scar on his forehead from the bullet that grazed his skull and left him with a traumatic brain injury — has struggled to reckon with what happened to him.
“Ralph minimized it as if nothing happened,” said his mother, Cleo Nagbe. “But the thing with trauma is that the body will process it when it’s ready. I knew it was coming.”
“At times, he wants to disappear,” she said.
Yarl has mentally struggled to recover from the shooting
Nagbe said her son suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, which she believes played a role in his totaling two vehicles in the past three months. In one of the accidents, he crashed into a tree.
Yarl said surviving the shooting has forced him to tend to his mental health. “It is…
Read the full article here
