Credit: Shreveport Police Department & Facebook
Dad’s Chilling Final Post Before Killing Eight Children In Shreveport Mass Shooting
The dad who killed eight children in the Shreveport mass shooting shared a chilling final post beforehand.
In the hours before dawn on Sunday, April 19, a 31-year-old Army veteran drove to three separate homes in Shreveport, Louisiana, walked through their doors, and opened fire on the people sleeping inside.
Eight children were killed. Seven of them were his own. The youngest was three years old. The oldest was eleven. Most were shot in the head while they slept, NPR reports.
By the time the sun had risen over the Cedar Grove neighbourhood, the gunman — identified by police as Shamar Elkins — was himself dead, shot by officers following a car chase into a neighbouring parish.
What he left behind was a crime scene that Shreveport’s police chief described as ‘disgusting and evil,’ a city in devastating grief, and a set of social media posts that have haunted the nation in the days since.
A city that thought it knew him
The Shreveport that Shamar Elkins grew up in, served in, and ultimately shattered on Sunday is a city of roughly 180,000 people in northwest Louisiana — a community where, according to officials, domestic violence accounts for more than 30 percent of all murders.
Even by those grim standards, what happened on Sunday morning was without precedent.
“This is a tragic situation, maybe the worst tragic situation we’ve ever had in Shreveport,” Mayor Tom Arceneaux said at a press conference that afternoon, his words carrying the weight of a man struggling to find language adequate to the moment.
Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith, standing before cameras with the crime scene still active behind him, was more direct about his own limits, Live Mint reports.
“My heart is just taken aback,” he said. “I just cannot begin to imagine how such an event can occur. I just don’t know what to say.”
Neighbours told reporters that the family had moved onto the block about six months ago. Freddie Montgomery, who lives across the street from one of the homes, said he had seen Elkins in the front yard the previous day, children playing around him.
“He waved at me and I waved back like normal,” he said. “When we found out what had actually happened over there, it was just a shock. There is no sense in this.”
A neighbour down the street, 71-year-old Mack London, said he hadn’t even heard the gunfire. He only learned of the killings from a neighbour as he stepped outside around 7 a.m. to close his gate, by which time the street was flooded with police and ambulances.
“Nothing like this has ever happened on this street,” he said. “It was bad. I hate that it happened to those kids.”
Who was Shamar Elkins?
Elkins served in the Louisiana Army National Guard for seven years, from August 2013 to August 2020, working as both a signal support system specialist and a fire support specialist. He never deployed overseas and left the service at the rank of private.
In March 2019, three years before the end of his service, he was arrested on charges of illegal use of weapons and carrying a firearm on school property — having fired five rounds at a moving vehicle from just 300 feet from a Shreveport high school, directly toward the building, per news.com.au.
He pleaded guilty to the weapons charge that October and was placed on 18 months’ probation. The firearm charge was dismissed.
That 2019 conviction, police confirmed on Sunday, likely prohibited him from legally owning firearms. Yet he had both a small-calibre handgun and a rifle-style pistol when police confronted him following the killings.
What happened on Sunday morning
Shreveport Police Corporal Chris Bordelon confirmed that officers responded to reports of a domestic disturbance on the 300 block of West 79th Street shortly after 6 a.m. Central Time.
The sequence of events, as investigators have pieced it together, began on nearby Harrison Street, where Elkins first shot a woman believed to be his girlfriend. He then drove to West 79th Street, where he entered two homes and opened fire on the children inside.
Eight children were killed, ranging in age from three to eleven, though police initially reported the range as one to fourteen. Seven were Elkins’ own children. The eighth was described variously as a cousin and a family friend by different officials.
Three boys and five girls. Most were shot in the head while they slept. One child — a teenage boy — managed to escape by jumping from a rooftop, sustaining several broken bones but surviving.
One of the eight victims was found dead on a back roof. Two women were shot: Elkins’ wife, who was shot in the face but survived, and the mother of the eighth child killed, who remained in critical condition.
After the shootings, Elkins carjacked a vehicle at the corner of West 79th Street and Linwood Avenue and led police on a chase into neighboring Bossier Parish, where officers shot and killed him. Louisiana State Police are investigating the officer-involved shooting as a matter of standard procedure. No officers were injured.
The children who died have been identified by their mothers and confirmed by the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office. They are Jayla Elkins, 3; Shayla Elkins, 5; Kayla Pugh, 6; Layla Pugh, 7; Markaydon Pugh, 10; Sariahh Snow, 11; Khedarrion Snow, 6; and Braylon Snow, 5.
A City Searching For Words
The human scale of what was lost landed most heavily in the moments when officials tried to give voice to it. Shreveport City Councillwoman Tabatha Taylor broke into tears at the press conference.
“I’m going to ask the community, along with prayer, with every mental health consultant that is out there: This family and this community needs you,” she said. “I need you. Because how do we get through this?”
State Representative Tammy Phelps noted that children had tried to flee through the back of the homes during the attack. Caddo Parish Public Schools Superintendent Keith Burton urged the community to support ‘our children, our families, and the educators and first responders who are carrying the weight of this moment.’
US House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was born in Shreveport and has represented the area in Congress for nearly a decade, called it a ‘heartbreaking tragedy.’
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry offered condolences via Facebook. Neither spoke at length about the broader question of gun violence in America.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people are shot, there have already been more than 110 such incidents in the United States in 2026 — roughly one per day. Sunday’s attack in Shreveport is the deadliest since January 2024.
Eight children who went to sleep on Saturday night and never woke up. A father who took his eldest to dinner hours before he took her siblings’ lives. A community left asking the question that no answer has yet reached: how do we get through this?
His Facebook page painted a picture of a man who appeared, by social media standards, to be a devoted father. In mid-April, he posted a photograph of himself surrounded by seven of his children at Easter. “Happy Easter had a wonderful time at church for the first time with all my kids what a blessed day,” he wrote beneath it.
The chilling post that haunts
But it is one post in particular that has drawn the most attention in the days since the massacre — because of when it was made.
On the evening of Saturday April 18, just hours before the killings, Elkins posted a photograph to Facebook of himself and his eldest daughter at a restaurant.
She was eating a burger, and he was clearly enjoying spending time with her. The caption read: “Lol!!!! Took my oldest on a lil 1 on 1 date had to catch her down bad ugh ugh,” followed by a string of laughing and crying emojis.
A loving father. A Friday night dinner. Normal family life. Hours later, most of his children were dead.
There was also, in the days prior, a post that reads very differently in retrospect. On April 9, Elkins published what appeared to be a prayer — an appeal to God for help with anger, depression, and anxiety.
“Dear God, Today I ask You to help me guard my mind and my emotions,” it read. “When negativity arises, remind me to say, ‘It does not belong to me, in the name of Jesus.’ When depression tries to settle in, when anger rises, when anxiety or panic comes, give me the awareness to recognize what is not from You and the strength to reject it immediately in the name of JESUS.”
Whether that post reflected a man in genuine spiritual crisis, or simply someone who shared devotional content on social media, is impossible to know.
A final controversial post was in response to the question: “Dads, if you could go back in time and have kids with a different woman but still have the same kids would you do it?”
Elkins wrote: “Hell yeah I would.”
What these posts have become, in the aftermath of Sunday’s events, is one of the most discussed pieces of the deeply troubling puzzle that is Shamar Elkins.
If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, available 24/7, or visit thehotline.org.
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