Kansas City police treated Andrew Lester so tenderly after he shot Ralph Yarl | Opinion

Kansas City police treated 84-year-old Andrew Lester with unusual tenderness on the night he shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl.

At Tuesday’s preliminary hearing, where Clay County Judge Louis Angles ruled that yes, Lester will have to stand trial on assault charges, Officer James Gale testified that because Lester, who had had a knee replacement, wasn’t walking too well at the time, “for his safety, he wasn’t handcuffed,” and sat in the front seat of a patrol car with Gale while waiting to be taken in for questioning.

Officer Larry Dunaway Jr. testified that he didn’t want to make Lester walk through the shattered glass on his front porch. Glass, that is, from the storm door through which Lester had twice shot Yarl after the boy rang his bell, which as the world now knows was the wrong bell.

So in part to make it easier for Lester, “I went to the back to talk to him,” after asking Lester to meet him there, Dunaway told the court. Then, “I said, ‘Can I pat you down for my protection?’ and he said yes.”

Such nice manners all around, it’s stunning. Lester even “mentioned that he was concerned about my welfare,” Dunaway told Lester’s attorney, Steve Salmon, in court.

“And the victim’s?” welfare too, Salmon asked, prompting him. Oh yes, Dunaway said. “To me, he seemed like an elderly guy who was scared.”

Lester, who wasn’t charged until four days after the shooting, has pleaded not guilty. He kept his head down and reacted very little at Tuesday’s hearing, though his jaw trembled as he rose to leave the courtroom after the judge said he’d have to stand trial. His knee replacement seems to have healed well, and he wasn’t leaning on his cane as he walked away.

So am I implying that the cops who arrived at Lester’s Northland home on April 13 of this year should have thrown the octogenarian on the ground? No. But I am saying that if more suspects were handled with such deference, well, to state the obvious, a bunch of dead Black people and also quite a few folks suffering from a mental illness would still be alive.

‘He wasn’t in my house but I shot him’

Lester’s attorney successfully goaded Yarl, a band nerd who speaks so softly he’s hard to hear, into testifying that he does understand how Lester might have been startled by the sight of a stranger at his door.

But the judge was right not to buy Salmon’s no-harm-no-foul argument that both Yarl and his client acted reasonably that night. Both, Salmon said, simply made an innocent mistake — Yarl when he went to the wrong address to retrieve his young twin brothers from a playdate, and Lester when he opened the door and fired twice because he believed Yarl was trying to break in.

“I don’t fault Mr. Yarl at all,” Salmon said magnanimously.

Only, as Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson argued, being afraid does not in itself give you the right to shoot someone “through a closed and locked storm door.” Under the law, you do have the right to defend yourself, but “you do not have the right to shoot a kid through a door two times because you don’t know what he wants.”

Yarl, Thompson said, “wasn’t armed,” or even carrying anything in his hands, and “wasn’t yanking violently” on the door, either. But because when the big wooden door swung open, Yarl was expecting to be welcomed inside, he stepped forward and pulled on the storm door handle right before being shot.

On the 911 call Lester made to police that night, Lester said, “I just had somebody ring my damn doorbell. … He wasn’t in my house but I shot him.” A “Black man about 6 feet tall,” he said, “was at my door trying to get in, and I shot him.” Then “he went running off.”

He did not get far.

Yarl is 5’ 10” and skinny, but looked a lot bigger and older to Lester, and very scary.

Grandson: Assailant radicalized by conservative media

Right after the shooting, Lester’s grandson told The Star that Lester had in a sense been set up for this tragedy by the conservative media outlets that had radicalized him, and made him assume the worst of the Black kid on his porch.

It is not a crime to be afraid of someone you don’t know who has knocked on your door. But had Lester even stopped to ask, “Yes?” before firing, that night might have gone very differently.

Instead, because Lester shot first and asked questions never, he’s going on trial for first-degree assault. Because he didn’t hesitate, Ralph Yarl continues to suffer from a traumatic brain injury. Because he thought he knew what was happening and was wrong, two families have been traumatized and a whole community retraumatized.

Jodi Dovel, one of the neighbors who called 911 that night, and put a towel under Yarl’s head while waiting for an ambulance to arrive, still hasn’t been able to get the bloodstains off of her front door, which Yarl banged on looking for help. “But it’s OK,” she told the court, sounding like it was very much not OK.

Paul Yarl, Ralph’s father, told me over the lunch break in the hearing that the defense team’s suggestion that Lester, poor old dodderer, was just trying to protect himself “doesn’t sit well with me. He was trying to finish him off.” And that Lester was reacting out of fear based on nothing justifies nothing, he said.

A longtime friend of Paul Yarl’s, Solo Zinnah, told me he cried while listening to the accounts of those neighbors who called 911, but didn’t for some time dare open their doors to a bleeding boy.

“It’s heartbreaking,” he said, “but there will be justice.” Which can, he added, come in many forms. “It can be retribution, or it can change people’s hearts to do the right thing.”

That, of course, is justice in its purest form. And you don’t have to hate a “radicalized” 84-year-old to hope that many hearts might change as a result of this one highly irrational act of violence.