Another loved to run outside and play with Nerf guns, as a grieving family member told the Washington Post.1Investigators are still piecing together exactly what happened early Sunday morning. But it appears the children were victims of domestic violence, killed by an Army National Guard veteran who was father to seven of the eight.Neighbors and friends have said the man was angry at the two women who were the children’s mothers, and who lived in the two homes where the shootings seem to have taken place over the span of about an hour. One of the women, to whom he was married, was in the process of seeking a divorce.The two women survived their wounds.

A third, the killer’s sister-in-law, escaped with a 12-year-old when they jumped off the roof during the rampage. As for the alleged killer, he is dead—shot either by himself or by police at a house where he tried to hide after the murders. Friends and family say that he had a history of mental illness, and that he had talked about “dark thoughts,” as one relative put it.Still, they said, he seemed to love his children.

Two days before the killings, he had posted a photo to his Facebook page showing his 11-year-old daughter sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car, a drink and ketchup packets in her lap while she bites into a burger.“Lol!!!! Took my oldest on a lil 1 on 1 date had to catch her down bad ugh ugh…” the post says, followed by several cheery emojis.ShareTHE SHREVEPORT MASSACRE is the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the January 2024 killings of eight people in Joliet, Illinois. The most lethal from previous years were the October 2023 killings at a Maine bowling alley and restaurant, the May 2023 killings at a Dallas-area outlet mall, and the January 2023 killings at a dance studio in Southern California.

And before that? There were the Uvalde school massacre and the Buffalo mall shootings, both in May 2022.Just to list all of these is to remember how routine mass shootings have become in the United States. But this one was different in one disturbing way.

All the other incidents commanded national attention, sometimes for days. Sunday’s killing made far less of an impression, getting second- or third-tier treatment on both television and online.You had to scroll six or seven times on a smartphone just to find the story on the New York Times homepage. And that was on the day it happened.

More than forty-eight hours have passed as I type these words, and—although outlets like the Post, Times, and Associated Press have reporters on the ground in Shreveport—the story has mostly vanished from the news.Unless you live there.Local media have provided nearly nonstop coverage—of the incident itself as well as the official followup and community reaction, which started organically on Sunday night when the owner of a nearby restaurant decided to close for the evening and host a vigil that attracted about fifty people.“I just felt moved to do it—I have kids,” Leon Bell told me by phone. His restaurant, Tha Thing, is just minutes from Cedar Grove, the lower-income, predominantly black neighborhood where the killings took place and where he grew up.

“We need to come together as a community . . . and to let people know that if somebody needs help, don’t be afraid to reach out and call.”That was also the message of James Green, a pastor and city council member. He got a call about the shootings at around 8 a.m., while teaching Sunday School, and then announced the news while leading services two hours later to an audience he described as stunned. “All I can describe it as is a bust in the gut, that takes the air out,” Green told me.During public appearances and in interviews, local officials have mentioned that gun violence is a familiar experience in Shreveport, breeding its own kind of indifference.

That is part of why leaders like Alan Jackson, a pastor and city council member, say the tributes and investigations are so important.“It’s gut wrenching,” Jackson told me in a phone interview. “This senseless violence has to stop, and I’m hoping this can be a wakeup call.”And it might be, at least in the Shreveport community, where the tragedy will linger in all kinds of ways—and in all kinds of places. Quanerick Milton, lead pastor at the Tabernacle Baptist Church-MLK in Shreveport, told me that he spoke to a teacher who had one of the murdered children in their class—and who described a day of open weeping from children and instructors alike.“It was a very emotional day for that particular classroom,” Milton said, “because no