Shocking Reason Why Shamar Elkins Killed His 8 Children, Wife, & Ex-Wife in one Night
Does it ever feel like 2026 made up its mind to break us before it even got started? January brought El Mancho and people could not look away. February arrived and Nancy Guthrie disappeared without a single answer left behind. We were still sitting with both of those when Lynette Hookers case hit. And somehow in the middle of carrying all of that, most of the country nearly forgot that the United States and Iran had been standing at the edge of something that could have changed everything. Loss after loss, case after
case, and this year is not even halfway done. Then came April 19th, Shreveport, Louisiana. Before the city was fully awake that Sunday morning, eight children had already been shot dead inside a home on West 79th Street. Three boys, five girls. The youngest was 3 years old. The oldest was 11.
Seven of them shared a father. The eighth was their cousin. That father was Shamarr Elkins, 31 years old, 7 years in the National Guard, a man his neighbors knew by name and waved at from across the street. And sometime between Saturday evening and 5:55 a.m. on Sunday, while every one of those children was still asleep, he finished putting together a plan that had been years in the making.
Most channels covered this case and stopped at the surface. Today we go deeper. We are going to look at the criminal record that should have barred him from ever touching a firearm. The mental health system that discharged him back into a crisis. The man who was now been federally charged for giving him the gun.
And the question that every person who knew Shamarr Elkins is now living with, what were the signs and why wasn’t one of them enough? Shamarr Dwan Elkins was born December 7th, 1994 in Shreveport, Louisiana. He grew up in Cedar Grove, the North Side neighborhood where this story ends. His biological mother, Mehalia Elkins, gave birth to him as a teenager while battling a crack cocaine addiction.
She could not raise him. A family friend named Betty Walker stepped in and became the woman who actually raised him from childhood. Walker was his stability, his foundation. Mehalia and Shamarr reconnected in the mid-2010s after he was already an adult, already a soldier. At 18, Elkins enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard.
He served 7 years as a signal support system specialist and a fire support specialist, both roles involving weapon systems, coordinating firepower, and operating under pressure. He was never deployed overseas. In August 2020, he left the guard as a private, the lowest enlisted rank, and returned to Cedar Grove with no documented transition support on public record.
Seven years of military training, then civilian life with no bridge between the two. He went to work at UPS. His coworker, Willie Vasher, described him to the New York Times as someone who appeared to be a devoted family man. But Vasher also noticed something he couldn’t explain away, a bald spot on Elkins’s head, not from genetics, but from stress.
He pulled his own hair out throughout the work day, strand by strand, every shift. His family had noticed it, too. Everyone around him could see it. Nobody asked what it meant. By 2026, Elkins had two households. He was married to Shinequa Pugh, with whom he shared four children. He also had a previous marriage to Christina Snow, with whom he had three more children.
Christina lived on Harrison Street, one block from the West 79th Street home where Elkins lived with Shinequa. Two families, financial pressure across both, a marriage dissolving, and a criminal history that most people in his life knew nothing about. Shamarr Elkins had at least two prior criminal convictions before April 19th, 2026.
The first was a DWI in 2016. The second is the one that changes everything about what happened on that Sunday morning. In 2019, Elkins was arrested near Caddo Magnet High School. According to a police report cited by KTBS, he pulled a 9-mm handgun from his waistband and fired five rounds at a vehicle approximately 300 feet from the school while children were present outside.
He claimed the driver had pointed a gun at him first. He pleaded guilty to illegal use of a weapon. The school property charge was dismissed. He received 18 months of probation. Under Louisiana law, that conviction legally barred Elkins from possessing any firearm until at least 2029. Not a technicality, a hard legal prohibition on record.
On April 19th, 2026, he had two weapons, a small-caliber handgun used in the first part of the attack, and a Mossberg rifle-style pistol, what police described as an assault pistol that he was still carrying when officers confronted him in Bossier City hours later. Two days after the shooting, on April 21st, the US Department of Justice provided the first public answer to how those weapons reached him.
Federal agents charged Charles Ford, a 56-year-old Shreveport resident and himself a convicted felon, with being a felon in possession of a firearm and making a false statement to federal agents. ATF traced the rifle to its original legal purchaser, who identified Ford as the person she had given it to. When agents first interviewed Ford, he denied ever having the weapon.
He later admitted he kept it under the seat of his truck. He admitted he believed Elkins took it from him. Ford now faces up to 15 years on the felon in possession charge and five additional years for lying to federal agents. US Attorney Zachary Keller confirmed the investigation into the full firearms acquisition chain is ongoing.
How Elkins obtained the handgun has not yet been publicly addressed. Two convicted felons, one illegal weapon passed between them, a legal prohibition on the books since 2019, and a system that never flagged it until after eight children were dead. There is a moment in 2023 that reframes everything that followed, and it is the moment that, had it been reported, would have entered every subsequent system interaction as critical information.
In 2023, Shinequa Pugh considered leaving Shamarr Elkins. According to Betty Walker, the woman who raised him and who spoke directly to the New York Times, when Shinequa raised the possibility of leaving and taking the children, Elkins was furious. He told her directly, if they tried to leave, he would kill her, kill the children, and kill himself.
Walker said she ultimately dismissed it when Elkins told her he was just playing. Shinequa stayed. They married in April 2024. The court date to finalize their divorce was set for Monday, April 20th, the morning after the shooting. That threat was never reported to police. It never entered a domestic violence database.
It never appeared in any court document until after eight children were dead. It sat as private family knowledge for nearly 3 years. Researchers who study intimate partner homicide are consistent on this point. Explicit pre-separation death threats are among the strongest statistical predictors of lethal violence.
They are not impulsive outbursts. They function as declarations of ownership, a partner establishing that the relationship ends on his terms or not at all. The fact that Shinequa stayed does not mean she wasn’t afraid. Studies on domestic violence consistently show that the period of attempted separation is statistically the most dangerous time for victims, which is the calculation many make when deciding whether leaving is actually safe.
Shinequa eventually did file for divorce, citing infidelity. A detail confirmed to CNN by Troy Brown, Elkins’s brother-in-law, who lived in the West 79th Street home. The 2023 threat had been sitting inside that marriage for nearly 3 years. When the legal process of ending the marriage reached its final stage, it became operational.
Had it been reported in 2023, it would have been on file when he presented at the VA. It would have been relevant to the divorce proceeding. It would have triggered a lethality screening. It wasn’t reported, so none of those systems ever had it. In January 2026, confirmed by Troy Brown to Time magazine and the AP, Shamarr Elkins checked himself into the Veterans Affairs hospital in Shreveport for a mental health evaluation.
Betty Walker confirmed separately to the New York Times that this followed a suicide attempt. He recognized something was wrong and he sought help voluntarily. He stayed approximately 10 days. He was discharged. Troy Brown told reporters that when Elkins returned home, he seemed better talking about being a good father and getting things right.
Brown asked him directly whether he needed to go back to the hospital. Elkins told him he was fine, that he would just deal with it. Brown told AP, “I wish he went ahead and gotten the help.” What the VA sent him back into a marriage in active dissolution, financial pressure across two households, and no documented follow-up support structure on public record.
The same conditions that produced the crisis in the first place, unchanged. Within weeks of discharge, things deteriorated. On Easter Sunday, April 5th, Elkins called his mother Mahalia and his stepfather Marcus Jackson. He was crying. He told them Shanyqua had filed for divorce and that he was drowning in dark thoughts.
His stepfather tried to reassure him. Elkins replied, “Some people don’t come back from their demons.” The call ended. No crisis line was contacted, no welfare check was made, no one called police. As the New York Times noted, most families respond exactly this way because most of the time a call like that does not produce what happened here.
The family’s response was not unusual. What was unusual was the full picture. The family couldn’t see the weapons prohibition, the 2023 death threat, the discharge from inpatient psychiatric care back into an escalating situation. The question that remains publicly unanswered is what Elkins’ VA discharge assessment contained.
Was a lethality screening conducted? Was the pending divorce flagged as a risk factor? Was the 2019 firearms conviction cross-referenced with the discharge plan? The VA has not publicly addressed any of those questions. Christina Snow was not Elkins’ girlfriend. She was his ex-wife and the mother of three of his children, living one block from his current home on West 79th Street.
Their three children, Braylin Snow, age 5, Kadarian Snow, age 6, Serayah Snow, age 11. At approximately 5:55 a.m. on April 19th, Elkins arrived at her door on Harrison Street first before he went to the West 79th Street house. He knocked, he shot her nine times. He took all three of her children and drove to West 79th Street.
Christina Snow survived. Her aunt Lashun Berry told CNN that after being shot, Christina used Siri to call 911. She was conscious enough to give investigators a full account of what happened at her door before sunrise. As of the most recent confirmed reporting, both Christina Snow and Shanyqua Pugh are expected to survive.
Shanyqua sustained multiple gunshot wounds to the face and stomach and has undergone multiple surgeries, according to her aunt’s account to the New York Times. The Shreveport police dispatch log confirms officers did not receive the call from Harrison Street until 6:07 a.m.
, over an hour after the first call from West 79th Street. Dispatch linked both locations at 6:10 a.m. At 6:20, officers received information that Christina’s three children might be inside the carjack vehicle. At 6:40, officers confirmed the vehicle was empty. The Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office confirmed all eight children were killed at the West 79th Street address, including Christina’s three.
The precise sequence of events between the two locations remains part of the active investigation. We begin with a community grieving after a mass shooting in Louisiana. 10 people were shot in Shreveport, eight were killed, all of them children. The gunman also dead. Police say the attacks happened [music] at two homes.
CBS’s Jason Allen is there for us tonight with the details. Jason. Jericka, good evening. People are still filling this Shreveport neighborhood tonight, emotional and upset over this shooting that happened both at this house behind me and another one just up the road. And police told me in the last hour it was a survivor of the shooting who escaped and called them to tell them about it just after 6:00 this morning.
When police got here, they found 10 people had been shot, eight of them had been killed, and as you mentioned, all eight of those were children. Police also confirming for me that at least seven of those eight children were the children of the shooter, who they identified as Shamar Elkins. After the shooting, police say that Elkins carjacked someone just down the street, got into a pursuit with police, stopped.
They say he produced a handgun and police officers shot him there at the scene. Louisiana State Police tonight are also involved in this investigation. This is a tragic situation, maybe the worst tragic situations you’ve ever had in Shreveport. I don’t know what people think in the crevices [snorts] of their mind >> [laughter] >> to want to harm another human being, let alone that of children who have their whole lives ahead of them.
Why Elkins went to Harrison Street first, whether driven by the affair, the divorce, or something specific that occurred that night, has not been formally established by investigators. Saturday afternoon, April 18th, less than 12 hours before the first call to dispatch, Freddy Montgomery, a neighbor across the street, walked past and saw Elkins sitting on his front porch watching the children play in the yard.
The two men waved at each other. Montgomery told CNN there was nothing in that moment that suggested anything was wrong. That same evening, Elkins took his eldest daughter to dinner, just the two of them. He posted about it on social media with laughing emojis. The night before he killed her siblings, he was photographed smiling over a burger with his child. At 9:00 p.m.
, Troy Brown left for his night shift. He told AP that Elkins was calm, joking around as Brown moved his car out of the driveway to let him leave. Brown’s nephew, Markaden Pugh, 10 years old, cousin to Elkins’ biological children, was alive inside the house when Brown drove away. Markaden did not survive the night. Brown’s wife survived by jumping from the roof.
His one, two-year-old daughter jumped alongside her with scratches. His nephew was found dead inside the home. The divorce papers were ready. The court date was the next morning. The 2023 threat that if Shanyqua ever left, he would kill everyone was about to become legally irrelevant because the marriage was ending with or without his consent.
What behavioral research on familicide consistently documents is directly applicable here. Perpetrators in these cases rarely act impulsively. The violence is planned. The perpetrator typically presents as calm in the hours before, sometimes unusually so. The trigger is not sudden rage. It is the perception of losing control, a court date, a finalization, a point of no return.
Every element of that pattern was present on the night of April 18th. The hours between 9:00 p.m. and 5:55 a.m. are not fully documented in any public source. What is confirmed is where he went when those hours ended. 5:55 a.m., Shreveport police received the first call, a disturbance at the 300 block of West 79th Street.
“The caller is on the roof, the suspect is inside, someone has been shot.” 6:00 a.m., she and her children have escaped from the roof and are in the backyard. 6:01 a.m., officers arrive on scene. The caller was Kosha Pugh, Shanyqua’s sister, who lived in that house. She and her 12-year-old daughter both jumped from the roof.
Both sustained broken bones. Both survived. Kosha made those calls while the attack was still happening inside the home below her. Police spokesperson Chris Bordelon confirmed that most of the children appeared to have been shot in their sleep. Most were shot in the head. Seven of the eight were found inside the home. The eighth was found dead on the back roof.
Bullet holes were recovered from the rear door, evidence that at least some of the children had tried to escape through the back of the house and didn’t make it out. On how those final moments unfolded, a claim was made on social media by an account identified as belonging to Michael Mayance, described as a former Army mentor of Elkins, stating that Elkins arrived at his home.
They spoke briefly and Elkins then shot himself. That post was subsequently deleted. The Shreveport Bossier Advocate confirmed the claim exists, but noted the post was removed. Louisiana State Police spokesperson Eddie Thomas confirmed the investigation will not be rushed and that results will be delivered to the Caddo District Attorney’s Office.
Whether Elkins died from a self-inflicted wound or from officer gunfire remains officially under investigation. 7:03 a.m., Shamar Elkins is pronounced dead at the scene. The eight children confirmed by the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office, Jayla Elkins, 3, Shayla Elkins, 5, Braylin Snow, 5, Caleb Pugh, 6, Kadarian Snow, 6, Layla Pugh, 7, Markaden Pugh, 10, Serayah Snow, 11.
Five girls, three boys, all killed at West 79th Street before the city finished waking up. Step back from the timeline and look at the complete picture. A 2019 weapons conviction on file that legally barred Elkins from firearms until 2029, a January 2026 VA hospitalization following a confirmed suicide attempt, a divorce proceeding with a court date the following morning, a 2023 death threat against his wife and children that was never reported to any authority.
A brother-in-law living in the same house who watched the deterioration and asked directly whether Elkins needed to return to the hospital. Five data points spread across law enforcement records, the VA system, the court system, and private family knowledge. Never connected, never assembled into a single risk picture.
Never acted on before April 19th. Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith said at his Monday press conference that the violence stemmed from a domestic dispute and added that the chances were good this was not the first time implying prior incidents that went unreported or undocumented. As of April 23rd, 2026, four investigations remain open.
The ATF full firearms procurement inquiry, the federal prosecution of Charles Ford, the Louisiana State Police officer-involved shooting investigation, and the Shreveport Police Department’s active motive investigation. None have produced final public findings. The Louisiana Governor’s Love One Louisiana Foundation has covered all funeral costs for the eight children.
The Community Foundation of North Louisiana has launched dedicated survivor funds. Both women remain in recovery. The systemic questions this case forces are specific. Should a VA discharge for a veteran with an active firearms prohibition and a contested divorce trigger automatic cross-agency notification? Should a domestic violence lethality screening be mandatory when a divorce is filed against someone with a prior weapons conviction? What would it take to connect those systems in real time? Those are policy questions. They are
also the questions that eight families in Shreveport are now living inside permanently. This case is not closed. When the Ford prosecution advances, when investigation findings are released, when the full firearms trace is made public, we will cover it here. If this is the kind of reporting you want, verified, sourced, no filler, subscribe.
Every case on this channel is built the same way. Confirmed facts, open questions named as open, and nothing added for shock value alone. Those eight children deserved every year that was taken from them. That full accounting is still being written. We will be here when it is.
