After 8 Children Die, Survivors Reveal How Louisiana Normalizes Partner Violence

This story contains detailed descriptions of domestic violence, gun violence, child death, and intimate partner abuse. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or text START to 88788.

SHREVEPORT, Lousiana— When Jekyra Carter woke to the sound of sirens on April 19, news quickly followed: eight children had been killed just a block from her home, seven of them shot by their own father in what appeared to be a domestic violence massacre. It pulled her back to the long, winding battle that had landed her own abuser in jail just weeks earlier.

“It happens all the time,” the 21-year-old mother of two toddlers said, her voice breaking as she recalled the shooting in the Cedar Grove neighborhood. The thought of the violence in her home turning deadly against her children or herself was “the main reason why [she] couldn’t continue to go through it.”

But to get free from her abuser, she journeyed through years that included bouts of physical and verbal abuse and countless police interventions that led to little change. Over the course of two years, officers responded to repeated 911 calls and written reports but left her abuser in the house each time, forcing Carter to document the bruises and broken furniture. Only once she built a relationship with a specific officer who became sympathetic was the man finally removed from her home.

Looking back, she now feels “lucky.” 

“It could have been me or any of my friends who are going through it worse than I was because that’s what they know [violence],” she said from her porch about the mass shooting. 

“They,” she said, referring to government institutions, police, and people in Shreveport, “don’t start taking it serious until it gets too late.”

Carter’s feelings and experience reflects a systemic failure that has made Louisiana one of the deadliest states in America for women and children. Since 1997, Louisiana women and children have been fatal victims of domestic violence at a rate that is nearly double the U.S. average. For Black women, it is even higher. 

“It could have been me or any of my friends who are going through it worse than I was because that’s what they know [violence].”

Jekyra Carter, a resident of Shreveport, Louisiana’s Cedar Grove neighborhood

Interviews with domestic violence survivors in Shreveport reveal a culture where abuse is dismissed as “normal relationship problems,” where police won’t remove abusers from shared homes until violence becomes “super physical,” and where economic vulnerability traps Black women in dangerous relationships. 

In Shreveport, a majority-Black city, more than 30% of homicides are domestic-related, which is three times the national average. 

Carter’s trauma has deepened her normalization of this reality. “It’s fine, I mean, who cares?” she said about the violence she experienced. 

State law gives officers discretion over whether to arrest abusers in simple assault cases, requiring victims to prove “impending danger” before intervention — a threshold that survivors told Capital B comes only after years of escalating violence. The April 19 mass shooting has exposed what advocates describe as a crisis of normalized violence in Louisiana’s Black communities, where nearly half of all domestic abuse survivors never report their abuse due to fear, financial dependence, and systemic distrust. 

Shamar Elkins, the man who shot and killed his children and shot and seriously injured two romantic partners, had threatened to kill his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh, and children a year before the tragedy, but the threat was not reported. Pugh was planning on divorcing Elkins.

The children’s deaths are part of a particular phenomenon called “family annihilation” in which people kill many relatives. Between 2020 and 2023, such killings happened once every five days on average nationwide. 

Combined, the systemic failures and a culture where guns and violence have been “accepted” equals a society where “men feel like they can control everybody around them down here, especially [women],” Carter said.

In the week after the Cedar Grove killings, the violence felt statewide. A white man was arrested for allegedly planning a mass shooting in New Orleans targeting Black people, and a teenager was killed during a mass shooting at Baton Rouge’s Mall of Louisiana.

Domestic violence in a city of guns

Just days before the mass shooting in Shreveport, the local sheriff’s office opened a new domestic violence unit because of a recent rise in incidents.

“We stood as a community to announce the opening of the Caddo Sheriff’s Office Domestic Violence Unit. That announcement was a step forward in protecting victims, supporting families, and strengthening our response to domestic violence,” Caddo Parish Sheriff Henry Whitehorn said. “I don’t believe any of us could have imagined that only days later, our community would be shaken by one of the most heartbreaking tragedies we have ever witnessed.”

But some residents could see such an incident happening. Just one block from the site of the mass shooting, Sherri, 50, said she has routinely seen that police “don’t come” when “a man is beating on a woman inside her own house.” If they finally show up, they tell her to protect herself and then pull off down the street, she said.  

Sherri, who was fearful to share her last name, lives with post-traumatic stress disorder and carries her own history of domestic violence. Almost all of the women in her life, she said, have been hurt by partners, too.

What scares her even more now are the guns. In her mind, Shreveport stopped being a place where people “talked or even fought it out” and became a place where people could walk into a pawn shop and walk out with an “automatic weapon or a [Glock] 9 [mm].” 

This has turned every argument — including with a partner — into a situation that could end in a funeral. She’s watched men storm out after an argument, only to come back waving a gun in the yard, turning what started as shouting into a standoff everyone on the block can hear.

Over the past 40 years, Louisiana has led the nation in fatal gun violence, and in cities like Shreveport, it is increasingly becoming domestic. 

Louisiana recently repealed its concealed carry permit requirement, allowing most adults to carry loaded firearms without a permit, background check, or safety training, even as research in other states links such laws to higher violence. Firearms are the leading cause of intimate partner homicide in Louisiana, and advocates say gaps in enforcement still allow people barred from owning guns to get them — including, they note, the man accused in the Cedar Grove massacre.

Some men in Cedar Grove said the guns feel inevitable. At a barbecue a few streets over from the mass shooting, a father named Frankie Johnson shrugged when asked about Shreveport’s shootings, saying it had “been like that before I was born,” and described a mindset where you either “get somebody before they get you or risk being killed for nothing at all.” 

He lifted his pants to show two scars from where he’d been shot last year in a random drive-by shooting. 

Still, on the Saturday after the mass shooting, dozens of Black children frolicked in the neighborhood, slurping on snowballs and playing tag. Despite the violence, Johnson said, people are trying to keep the neighborhood together. 

Yet Johnson, too, has seen how gun violence has seeped into how men in Shreveport see themselves — always on guard and ready to reach for a weapon first. That mentality rooted in fear and control is often brought into the home and relationships.

“It is what you see from little,” he said, referring to his neighborhood and violence.

Cedar Grove looks like one neighborhood on a map, but it has long been split in two.

On the south side where the shooting happened, about 85% of residents are Black and people get by on roughly $18,000 a year. On the north side, the section is roughly 85% white, with per capita income around $118,000. Those diverging numbers mirror the broader racial split in Shreveport, where Black residents are far more likely to live in poverty, die younger, and be incarcerated.

As state Rep. Tammy Phelps, who is from Cedar Grove and running for mayor in Shreveport, said after the mass shooting, the neighborhood still carries the pain from a 1988 race riot that turned the area into what officials called a “powder keg.” It deepened mistrust with law enforcement and made violence feel like an accepted routine, some residents said when asked. 

“I was just speaking last week on how we begin to share the history of the 1988 Cedar Grove Riot with new generations … and now this,” Phelps said.

After the massacre, a rush for help

By the end of the week, Carter had lost track of how many news crews had rolled down her block, but not of the numbers on her phone. Since the shooting, she said, friends who once brushed off bruises as “relationship problems” have been rethinking and wondering where they should go if they decide they can’t take it anymore. 

“They see it can get that bad,” she said. “Now they scared for real.”

Across Shreveport, the same pattern is showing up. In the days after the killings, local domestic violence hotlines and outreach programs reported a surge in calls, and advocates said women were walking into shelters and counseling centers with fresh injuries and long‑buried stories they had never shared before. At Project Celebration, one of the main service providers in northwest Louisiana, staff told local reporters they are hearing from survivors who say the Cedar Grove massacre finally convinced them that threats to kill the kids or “shoot everybody” might not be empty.

In the wake of the shooting, Shreveport police and local nonprofits announced a program to provide Ring doorbell cameras to domestic violence survivors, promising better documentation of stalking and protective‑order violations. Advocates say the cameras can give survivors more leverage with the justice system, but worry about police access to private footage and expanded surveillance.

They also stress that a doorbell can’t fix what is broken. Programs that hand out cameras or extra patrols usually require a police report or protective order, which many Black women in Cedar Grove say they are too afraid or too exhausted to pursue after years of being dismissed.

Louisiana social work groups estimate that more than two‑thirds of the state’s mental health needs go unmet, and that children exposed to violence at home almost never get long‑term therapy. In Shreveport, shelters run at or near capacity, and advocates say they lack enough beds, legal aid, or cash assistance to help every woman who calls.

“The gun violence, domestic violence. It’s just too much,” Carter said, gesturing down her street lined with aging homes, trash, and abandoned tires and mattresses. “In just one little city with nothing here.”

That gap between crisis help and daily reality is why the culture still feels unchanged to many of the women who live closest to the violence. Carter has heard of the resources now available, but for most of her life, she said, domestic abuse was something you just “survived.” 

She is now more open about her experiences, telling people about the officer who finally listened and the moment she decided that “it could have been me or my babies.” She also understands that a camera on the door or a hotline number in their phone won’t change the fact that, in Cedar Grove, guns and violence are still seen as part of being a man and part of being in love — at least until enough people decide that “it happens all the time” is no longer something they are willing to live with.

Read More: 

• 20 Years After Katrina, Louisiana Residents Are Most Vulnerable to ‘Die of Despair’
• What Recent Killings of Black Women Reveal About a Growing Crisis

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