A 31-year-old Shreveport, Louisiana, man shot and killed eight children, seven of them his own, across two homes before dawn on Sunday, police said. A ninth child, a 13-year-old boy, survived by jumping from a roof and breaking bones in the fall.
Two women were also shot and critically wounded. Both survived. The suspect, Shamar Elkins, fled the scene, carjacked a vehicle, and led officers on a pursuit into neighboring Bossier City, where he died.
The dead children were three boys and five girls. The youngest was three years old. The oldest was eleven. Police said many of them were asleep when the shooting began.
Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith said the first 911 call came in at 5:55 a.m. The caller told dispatch they were on the roof of the house and that someone inside had a gun and was shooting, The US Sun reported.
A few minutes later, a second call reported that the woman and her children had made it off the roof and were now in the backyard. One woman had escaped through a roof window above the garage. The 13-year-old boy jumped from the roof to get away and suffered broken bones. He was taken to a hospital.
Not everyone made it out. Police said one child was found dead on the roof, killed while trying to escape the same way the survivors did.
Police said the attack unfolded across two locations. The first shooting happened on Harrison Street, where Elkins' wife was shot. He then moved to a second home on West 79th Street, where the children and another woman were shot. All eight children who died were found at that second house.
The coroner identified the dead as Jayla Elkins, 3; Shayla Elkins, 5; Braylon Snow, 5; Kayla Pugh, 6; Khedarrion Snow, 6; Layla Pugh, 7; Markaydon Pugh, 10; and Sariahh Snow, 11. Police said Elkins was the father of seven of them.
These were not strangers caught in crossfire. They were small children in their own beds, in a home where they should have been safe. The youngest, Jayla, was three. She shared a last name with the man police say killed her.
Louisiana has seen other mass-casualty shootings in recent memory, but the age of the victims and the domestic nature of this attack set it apart.
After the shootings, Elkins fled the scene and carjacked a vehicle nearby. Officers pursued him into Bossier City, where the chase ended and Elkins died. Police said a handgun believed to have been used in the killings was recovered at the Bossier City scene.
Police spokesperson Chris Bordelon said Elkins was known to officers but that there was no known history of domestic violence involving him. That gap, a man known to police, yet with no documented domestic violence record, who then carried out one of the worst acts of family violence in recent memory, is one investigators will have to account for.
No motive has been publicly stated. Police said Elkins acted alone.
Key questions remain open. The names of the two surviving women have not been released. It is unclear which of the eight children was found dead on the roof. Police have not said publicly how Elkins died in Bossier City beyond confirming that he was killed there after the pursuit ended.
The relationship between Elkins and the eighth child, the one who was not his, has not been clarified. Nor have investigators explained what brought Elkins to the second home on West 79th Street, or whether anyone at that address had warning of what was coming.
Violent attacks against the most vulnerable members of a household are not new in this country. Just weeks ago, a fatal hammer attack at a Florida gas station renewed debate about how communities protect those who cannot protect themselves.
In cases like these, the questions that follow are always the same. Were there warning signs? Did anyone see something? Could the system have intervened? Bordelon's statement, that Elkins had no known domestic violence history, suggests the formal system had nothing to act on. That will be cold comfort to the families now burying children.
The surviving boy, just thirteen, jumped from a roof in the dark to save his own life. He broke bones doing it. He is alive because he chose a fall over what was happening inside that house.
Across the country, communities continue to grapple with sudden, devastating violence. Shootings that leave survivors fighting for their lives are no longer rare enough to shock the way they should. But the sheer scale of what happened in Shreveport, eight children, one household, one man, demands a reckoning that goes beyond the usual cycle of grief and forgetting.
The criminal justice system will never hold Elkins accountable. He is dead. The two women he shot are fighting to survive. The boy who jumped is in a hospital bed. And eight children, the youngest barely old enough to speak, are gone.
When society talks about protecting children, cases like these are the ones that test whether the words mean anything. Domestic violence screening, red-flag enforcement, community awareness, none of it mattered here, because none of it, by all available accounts, was triggered.
Shreveport now joins a grim list of American cities forced to bury children killed by someone who was supposed to love them. The investigation will continue. The funerals will come. The 13-year-old boy will heal, physically, at least.
But the hardest truth is the simplest one. Eight children were asleep in a house in Louisiana, and their father walked in with a gun. No system stopped him. No law flagged him. No one saw it coming, or if they did, no one acted in time.
A society that cannot keep three-year-olds safe in their own beds has work to do that no press conference or policy paper can finish.
