Shreveport rampage kills eight children, reigniting Louisiana domestic violence alarm

Eight children were killed in a 68-minute domestic-violence rampage that tore through two homes in Shreveport’s Cedar Grove neighborhood, ending only when police shot Shamar Elkins after a vehicle chase into Bossier City.

Relatives said Elkins had been in severe mental distress before the attack. They said he contacted his mother and stepfather on Easter Sunday and told them he wanted to end his life, describing himself as being in dark thoughts while his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh, wanted a divorce. The timeline of the killings has sharpened questions about how family warning signs, mental-health intervention and firearms enforcement failed to stop a man relatives believed was spiraling.

Police said the shootings began around 6 a.m. on April 19 and unfolded over 68 minutes across two homes. Elkins killed eight children, seven of them his own, in a case authorities described as domestic violence. The victims were between 3 and 11 years old. Two women were wounded, including Pugh, whom relatives said was critically injured.

Investigators said Elkins used an assault-style weapon despite a 2019 felony firearms conviction. That detail has become central to the debate over how a person with a violent record and reported suicidal thoughts still had access to a weapon capable of inflicting mass casualties in a matter of minutes. Police later shot and killed Elkins during the chase that ended in neighboring Bossier City.

The slaughter has drawn fresh attention to Louisiana’s broader domestic violence crisis. The Louisiana Domestic Abuse Fatality Review found that 181 Louisiana residents died in intimate-partner-violence cases from 2020 to 2022. In Shreveport, police said they responded to nearly 3,000 domestic-violence-related calls in 2025, and domestic violence accounted for more than 20% of the city’s homicides.

Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith said April 19 would be remembered as one of the worst days in the city’s history. For public-health and gun-violence experts, the case underscores a recurring pattern: threats, suicidal talk and domestic abuse often appear together long before the violence becomes fatal, but the systems meant to intervene do not always move fast enough.