Deadliest US mass shooting in over two years kills eight children, two women wounded

Eight children were killed and two women were critically wounded in a predawn shooting that police said was entirely a domestic incident, a killing spree that left Shreveport shaken and became the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in more than two years.

Police identified the gunman as 31-year-old Shamar Elkins. Authorities said the violence spread across two houses in a neighborhood south of downtown Shreveport, Louisiana, where seven children were killed inside one home and an eighth child was found dead on the roof after apparently trying to escape. Another child jumped off the roof, was hospitalized and was expected to survive.

The children who died ranged in age from 3 to 11. The Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office released the names of the eight children killed in the shooting. Two women were also shot and critically wounded, including Elkins’ wife, who was the mother of some of the children. Relatives said Elkins had children with two women, and one of those women also lived nearby and was wounded.

Police and relatives described the case as a domestic dispute that had already moved into the court system. Elkins and his wife were in the middle of separating and were due in court Monday. Officials also said Elkins had been arrested in a 2019 firearms case, a detail that raises hard questions about warning signs, access to guns and whether earlier intervention could have changed the outcome.

Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith said he could not imagine how the event occurred. State Rep. Tammy Phelps said first responders were forced to confront an unimaginable scene. The shooting unfolded before sunrise, turning an ordinary residential area into a scene of mass death that stretched emergency crews, investigators and coroners across two homes and a roofline where one child tried desperately to get away.

The attack underscored how domestic violence, firearms and family court conflict can collide with fatal speed. In a city already reeling, the toll was not just measured in the eight young lives lost, but in the clear failures that allowed a separation dispute to become a mass casualty event.