USA Today, April 2026
Even in a nation accustomed to gun violence and mass shootings, news of a Louisiana father killing his own children left Americans in shock.How could he? How could any parent? There is a name for the crime police say Shamar Elkins committed when he fatally shot eight children in Shreveport on April 19: filicide, or the killing of a child by their parent. Parents, not strangers, are predominantly the killers: Some 500 American parents are arrested for the crime each year, according to a June 2023 article in the journal Current Psychiatry. That number doesn’t include the many such killings that end with parents taking their own lives.
Often, those child deaths are a result of abuse or neglect. More rare are cases like the one in Shreveport. Police said Elkins shot the mother of his children and another woman, as well as his seven children and one of their cousins, in a Sunday morning rampage that ended in his death.
This is the largest such case in at least 20 years, according to a review of a mass killings database by USA TODAY, the Associated Press and Northeastern University research professor of criminology James Alan Fox.
