Louisiana shooting kills eight children, wounds two women in domestic attack

A domestic-violence attack that moved across multiple homes in Cedar Grove left eight children dead, two adult women wounded and a teenager injured before police killed the suspect after a chase in a stolen car. The case has quickly become a national accountability story about how firearms, family violence and child protection can fail at once.

Police identified the suspect as Shamar Elkins and said he was the father of seven of the children killed. Authorities first said the victims ranged from 1 to 14 years old, then later said the children were three boys and five girls ages 3 to 11. The Caddo Parish Coroner's Office said one child was found outside a residence, apparently after trying to escape through the back of the house.

The shooting unfolded around 6 a.m. local time on April 19 in the Cedar Grove neighborhood of south Shreveport. Police said the gunfire touched at least three residential locations and four specific crime scenes, a spread that showed how quickly the violence escalated from one home to another. Investigators described the episode as entirely domestic in nature, and CBS News reported that the attack began at one residence before moving to another.

Police said Elkins had previously been arrested in a 2019 firearms case, a detail that is likely to intensify scrutiny of how warning signs, weapons access and domestic-violence intervention were handled before Sunday morning. The fact that seven of the children were his own underscores how much of the harm was concentrated inside one family, even as the violence also struck a teenager and two women, including the mother of Elkins' children.

Elkins was later killed after officers pursued him in a stolen vehicle. Louisiana State Police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting because police were involved in the fatal encounter. Shreveport officials called the scene one of the most extensive they had seen.

The reaction spread quickly through city and state leadership. Mayor Tom Arceneaux, Gov. Jeff Landry, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Bill Cassidy publicly expressed condolences and said the community was in shock. Gun Violence Archive listed the Shreveport case as a mass shooting on April 19 with eight killed and two injured, placing the attack among the deadliest in the country this year and leaving Louisiana to confront another failure in the systems meant to keep children safe.