8 children killed in Shreveport shooting, motive unknown
Police are investigating a shooting that left eight children dead in Shreveport, with investigators investigating the suspect, weapon and motive.
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Even in a country accustomed to gun violence and mass shootings, the news of a Louisiana father killing his own children shocked Americans.
How could he? How could a parent do that?
The crime that police say Shamar Elkins committed when he shot and killed eight children in Shreveport on April 19 has a name: murder, the killing of a child by a parent.
According to a June 2023 article in the journal Current Psychiatry, the killers are primarily parents, not strangers. Approximately 500 American parents are arrested for crimes each year. This figure does not include the many murders that end in parents taking their own lives.
Often these child deaths are the result of abuse or neglect. Cases like Shreveport’s are even rarer. Police said Elkins went on a rampage Sunday morning, shooting and killing the children’s mother, another woman, seven other children and a cousin, before ultimately dying.
This is the largest incident of its kind in at least the past 20 years, according to a review of mass murder databases by USA TODAY, The Associated Press and Northeastern University Criminology Research Professor James Alan Fox.
Fox, who has studied mass killings in the United States since the 1980s, remembers only one more deadly mass killing than the 1987 killing of Ronald Gene Simmons in Arkansas. Simmons systematically murdered 14 members of his family, including his adult children and eight children and grandchildren, over a seven-day period before Christmas.
The media dubbed Simmons the “Devil of Pope County.” He was tried, sentenced to death, and executed by lethal injection in 1990.
“Our homes should be safe places, and parents should be people you can trust to never harm you,” said Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a forensic psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals. “I think that’s why (murders) can be so shocking.”
why parents kill their children
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Philip Resnick is widely credited with being the first person to conduct extensive research into the crime. In the 1960s, he investigated dozens of cases around the world and wrote a foundational paper on why parents kill their children.
Hatter’s Friedman, who studied with Resnick at Case Western, described four main motivations:
- deadly abuse. In these cases, she says, the child is often the victim of chronic abuse or neglect.
- unwanted child. Babies, especially after unwanted or secret pregnancies, are at greatest risk.
- partner’s revenge. There could be an impending breakup, an affair, or a custody battle. In these cases, “the father or mother is trying to punish or emotionally harm the other parent,” says Hatters-Friedman. “They see children as pawns.”
- acutely mentally abnormal. This motive is sometimes known as “altruistic” killing, where the parent is deeply depressed and “delusional that something worse than death is going to happen to their child,” she said.
Homicide is the only type of homicide in which men and women kill at roughly equal rates, she said. The perpetrators of other types of murder are far more likely to be male. There is one difference. Fathers who kill their children are more likely to die by suicide.
“The Devil of Pope County”
Ronald Gene Simmons, a decorated Vietnam veteran with 22 years of military service, committed one of the nation’s most horrific family massacres.
ABC Channel 40/29 News reported that Simmons was charged with sex crimes in New Mexico and moved his family to a property in Russellville, Arkansas, to escape authorities.
Two days before Christmas in 1987, Simmons murdered his wife, adult son, and 3-year-old granddaughter and dumped their bodies in a shallow hole dug as a barn.
Later that afternoon, when they returned home from school, he murdered four more Simmons children and piled their bodies in a pit outside, ABC 40/29 reports.
The assaults continued the day after Christmas, killing other adult children, their spouses, and grandchildren who had arrived for the holiday.
It wasn’t until Dec. 28 that Simmons went into town, bought a new gun at Walmart, and shot six more people, killing two, before forcing a woman at gunpoint to call police.
child death in louisiana
According to the latest report from the Louisiana Child Death Review Commission, homicide is the leading cause of injury-related death among children in Louisiana, followed by traffic accidents, drowning, and suicide.
From 2020 to 2022, 118 children were the victims of homicide in Louisiana, according to the commission’s latest report. Among children over the age of 1 who died in homicide, 63% were killed by a firearm. The study did not reveal how many firearm-related homicides were committed by parents.
Elkins was reportedly struggling with his impending separation from his wife, Shanequa Pugh. Crystal Brown, a cousin of one of the women injured in the shooting, told The Associated Press that Elkins and Pugh were scheduled to appear in court on April 20, the day after the shooting.
Elkins’ ex-partner, Christina Snow, sued Elkins for child support and was awarded joint custody of their child, Thalia, in 2017, according to court records. Among those killed in the shooting was 11-year-old Thalia.
Jayla Elkins, 3, was among the victims. Sheila Elkins, 5 years old. Kayla Pugh, 6 years old. Layla Pugh, 7 years old. Markedon Pugh, 10 years old. Thalia Snow, 11 years old. Kedarion Snow, 6 years old. and Braylon Snow, 5.
Elkins’ stepfather, Marcus Jackson, told the New York Times that in a phone call on Easter Sunday, Elkins’ stepson told him his wife wanted a divorce. Elkins wanted to take his own life and was plagued by “dark thoughts,” Jackson told the paper.
Dr. John Thompson, director of the Forensic Psychiatry Program at Tulane University School of Medicine, said he could not comment on Elkin’s murder, but that understanding motives is a complex task.
“It’s like trying to profile a serial killer; unless you know their entire life, you don’t know what actually happened,” he says.
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
