Ralph Yarl rang a doorbell looking for his twin brothers, but he got a shot in the head and fell to the ground. The shooter then stepped through the broken glass door and shot the teen again.
Yarl's family said that he ran to three homes looking for help before someone opened the door. The one that did told him to put his hands in the air and lay on the ground.
Behind that story was Jodi Rae, one of the neighbors who didn't open the door. She couldn't see who rang her bell through the door, but she heard the noise outside and called 911.
The dispatcher told her there was an active shooter and not to open the door. It turns out another neighbor had reported shots fired. Rae didn't know what to do because it could have been someone who needed help.
Talking about it with TMZ, she quickly began to cry thinking about the situation.
She said that at one point, she saw Yarl falling to his knees and her neighbor coming outside. That's when she opened the door and stepped in to help the teen. She saw the pools of blood and recognized he was the one who had been shot.
She asked her son to bring towels so they could apply pressure to Yarl's head, trying to keep the bleeding as low as possible. She said her neighbor held the boy's hand as she asked him about school to keep his mind off of his fear and pain.
"I'm sorry," Rae said sobbing. "He said, 'I just went over there and rang the doorbell, and the guy shot me in the head.'"
She found out Yarl attended the same school her son graduated from.
"He said, 'It hurts,' and he wanted to cry for a minute and I asked, do you play sports?" she remembered. He told her he runs track and he was in the band. He told her about going to the state competition to play his clarinet. "He started to want to cry again and I said, look at me. You're going to be ok."
Rae explained she'd moved to the area last year and didn't know her neighbor that shot Yarl. She said that the focus needs to be on Yarl and the struggles communities face. "There's been so much hate directed at us as neighbors. We had horrible signs put up in the neighborhood yesterday. And there are kids growing up here of all races."
She explained that protesters think that the neighbors didn't help Yarl, when the reality is they were told not to by 911, and once they realized what happened they came to help.
See the full video below or at the link here.
