A companion Pattern Hunters Policy Brief on the Cedar Grove case is available by request only to qualified policymakers, legislators, advocacy organizations, and journalists. Inquiries: andrea@patternhunters.com.

Eight Children, Two Mothers, and Cedar Grove's Unanswered Why

A Pattern Hunters Long-Form Analysis

What the law could not reach. What the federal map pre-decided in 1940. And what a community is rebuilding while the cameras pack up.

The Heartbeat That Remains

When the cameras stop rolling and the next news story comes to life on television screens, newspapers, and social media, this story will still be alive. The hurt and the pain will still be beating like a heartbeat. This community will still be wrestling with the disbelief that this happened where they live. And the question will still reign days and years to come: why. Why eight children died by the hands of their own father? Why two mothers will not only bear wounds but will also have to grieve their children. What will it take for us to wake up?

This is Pattern Hunters. So we are not going to write the wire story. The wire story is already done — it has names, ages, an address, a timeline, and a suspect now dead. The wire story is the data. The pattern is the analysis. Our job here is to take what the country will scroll past in seventy-two hours and lay it on the table where it belongs: in front of the geography that built it, the law that could not reach it, the masculinity that was never given language for it, and the community that is grieving inside it.

The pattern was visible. It was visible in 1940 when the federal government drew the line. It was visible in 1988 when this same neighborhood rose up. It was visible in 2019 when a young man pleaded guilty to firing five rounds near a school full of children and walked out with eighteen months of probation. It was visible two weeks before the shooting, when he checked himself into a VA hospital. The pattern was readable. The institutions tasked with reading it didn't.

Their Names Must Stay on Our Lips

Their names must stay on our lips. Jayla Elkins, 3. Shayla Elkins, 5. Kayla Pugh, 6. Layla Pugh, 7. Sariahh Snow, 11. Khedarrion Snow, 6. Braylon Snow, 5. And Mar’Kaydon Pugh, 10 — Troy Brown’s son, the cousin among siblings, the child his family will tell you was never not loved. Five girls. Three boys. Asleep in a home in the 300 block of West 79th Street when Shamar Elkins — father of seven of them — walked in with an assault-style pistol. Most were shot where they slept. One child reached the roof before being caught.

Their mothers survived the bullets but will not survive the years the same. Like Rachel in Ramah, they will weep for their children and refuse to be comforted, because they are no more. He shot his wife, Sheneiqua Pugh, after arguing about the divorce papers set to be signed the next morning. Then he drove to Christina Snow — mother of his oldest children — and shot her multiple times. Both women lay in hospital beds as neighbors lit candles a block away.

Mother’s Day is next Sunday. There will be no cards. No small arms around their necks. No crayoned construction-paper hearts. No little voices singing badly and beautifully in the kitchen. The grief these two women will carry is grief our public language does not yet have a name for — grief multiplied by betrayal, by survival, by the cruel arithmetic of being the parent left to remember.

The Theory the Law Won’t Read

The single most important thing the public must understand about cases like this one is that they are not random. They are not unforeseeable. They are not, in the language the wire stories love to use, “senseless.” They have a structure. Forensic criminologist Jane Monckton-Smith of the University of Gloucestershire built that structure from 372 cases of intimate partner femicide and laid it out in an eight-stage timeline: a pre-relationship history of stalking or abuse; a romance that escalates fast; a relationship dominated by coercive control; a trigger that threatens the perpetrator’s control — most commonly separation; escalation; a change in thinking, often toward homicide as solution; planning; and finally, the homicide, sometimes followed by suicide (Monckton-Smith, 2020). Recent population-level work confirms the temporal patterning: McLindon et al. (2025) mapped the sequenced emergence of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse in a nationally representative sample of Australian women, providing population-scale corroboration of what Monckton-Smith’s case-file analysis already showed. The framework is now embedded in police, probation, and public-protection training across the United Kingdom.

The Shreveport case fits the timeline so cleanly it could be a teaching exhibit. The trigger was the divorce papers set to be signed the next morning. The escalation was years long, according to relatives who told NBC News and The New York Times that Elkins had told his wife if she ever tried to leave him, he would kill her, the children, and himself. The planning was readable in the weapon — an assault-style pistol, prohibited to him as a convicted person, illegally obtained. The homicide and the self-inflicted gunshot that ended his own life close the timeline as Monckton-Smith (2020) predicted.

Sociologist Evan Stark named the architecture beneath this in Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. His argument is simple and damning: the law has spent decades chasing physical incidents while the actual machinery of intimate partner violence is psychological, economic, and surveillance-based — a sustained pattern of domination that physical violence merely punctuates (Stark, 2007). England and Wales criminalized coercive control in 2015. Scotland followed. Ireland followed. The United States has not. Louisiana has not. That gap is not academic. It is the gap a man like Shamar Elkins walks through to remain a free, armed, prohibited person until the morning he becomes a multiple-homicide statistic.

The literature on family annihilation is also explicit about what we are looking at here. Yardley et al. (2014) identified four types of male family annihilator — self-righteous, disappointed, anomic, and paranoid. The self-righteous annihilator destroys the family in retaliation for what he perceives as the mother’s decision to break the family unit; he sees breadwinner status and patriarchal control as central to his identity, and he treats the children as collateral in a conflict whose primary target is the mother. Karlsson et al. (2021), in a systematic review of familicide research, confirmed across the literature what every domestic-violence advocate already knows in her bones: recent or pending separation is the most consistent predictor, present in 75 to 85 percent of cases.

The pattern was visible. It is in the peer-reviewed record. It is in the training curricula of police forces in countries that have decided this kind of death is preventable. The question is whether Louisiana — and the United States — will read what the literature has been saying for fifteen years.

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The Law That Could Not Reach Him

In 2019, Caddo District Court records show, Shamar Elkins pleaded guilty to illegal use of a weapon after firing five rounds at a vehicle roughly 300 feet from Caddo Magnet High School while children played outside. He received eighteen months of probation. That conviction made him a prohibited person under federal law — 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) bars firearms possession by anyone convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year of imprisonment. The day his probation ended, he was no less prohibited. Six years later, he walked into 79th Street with an assault-style pistol.

Two days after the shooting, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana announced federal charges against Charles Ford, 56, for possession of the firearm later used in the killings (U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Louisiana, 2026). The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced the pistol through a chain that ended, according to the affidavit, with Ford keeping the weapon under the seat of his truck — from which it was taken on or about March 9. ATF officials said accountability does not stop at the trigger. They are right. They are also late.

The federal toolbox that should have caught this case has been narrowed by design. The Lautenberg Amendment (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9), 1996) bars firearms possession by persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence offenses — but it requires a conviction. Coercive control, threats, the years of warnings reported by Elkins’ family: none of that constitutes a conviction. United States v. Rahimi (2024) upheld the constitutionality of disarming respondents to civil domestic-violence protective orders — but it requires that an order have been filed. None had been. The federal floor catches only the violence that has already entered the formal record. The violence that produced Cedar Grove’s eight dead children was conducted, for years, in the space the federal floor cannot reach.

Louisiana, for its part, spent the last two years widening that gap rather than closing it. Act 2 of the 2024 First Extraordinary Session made Louisiana a permitless concealed-carry state. La. R.S. 40:1796 — the firearms preemption statute — bars Shreveport, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and every other municipality from enacting local firearms regulation more protective than state law. A city cannot decide, on its own, to require a permit it once required. A city cannot decide, on its own, to mandate red-flag procedures the legislature has refused to enact statewide. The geography that produces the most concentrated risk is denied the legal authority to respond to it. That is preemption working exactly as it was designed to work.

And so we end up here. A man on multiple lists. A federal felony conviction that should have barred him from firearms. A VA hospital that knew he had been hospitalized for mental health crisis. A family that knew the threats. A city without authority to legislate. A state that loosened its own gun laws while the rest of the country watched mass shootings climb. Every institution had him on a list. None had him on a prevention plan.

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The Federal Redline at 79th Street

In 1940, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation — a New Deal agency created in 1933 to refinance Depression-era mortgages — produced its residential security map of Shreveport. Cedar Grove, then as now an integrated working-class neighborhood of Sears kit homes, small churches, and a Piggly Wiggly on Linwood, was assigned Class D: hazardous, uninsurable, redlined. The federal surveyors did not extend their map to the southern edge of the neighborhood. They stopped at 79th Street. Everything south of that line was dismissed as too rural to classify, too undesirable to even rate. Eighty-six years later, eight children were murdered in the 300 block of West 79th Street. The federal redline ran through the address.

This is not metaphor. Rothstein (2017) documents in exhaustive detail that HOLC redlining was not a lapse, not an unfortunate inheritance, not the work of private prejudice the federal government merely failed to correct. It was federal policy, executed by federal agencies, codifying race-based residential segregation as the foundation of American homeownership and intergenerational wealth. Lipsitz (2018) traces how that policy created not just a wealth gap but a moral one — white Americans inheriting an asset structure they understand as earned, while the communities that were excluded inherit the surveillance, disinvestment, and policing that kept them excluded.

The geography is alive. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues in Golden Gulag that the prisons, jails, and surveillance infrastructures of the carceral state are geographical solutions to political-economic problems — the sites where capital warehouses the people it has discarded (Gilmore, 2007). Cedar Grove sits in the same logic. So does North Baton Rouge. So does the Lower 9th Ward. The state did not stop drawing lines in 1968. It just changed the names of the agencies that drew them.

The peer-reviewed evidence base is now overwhelming. Kraus et al. (2024), in a systematic review published in Public Health Nursing, examined 36 studies on HOLC redlining and contemporary health outcomes; 31 found significant associations between worse redlining grades and adverse outcomes including preterm birth, asthma severity, cancer, and — critically for our purposes — injury and violence. Dholakia et al. (2024), publishing in Annals of Internal Medicine, examined nonsuicide firearm fatalities from 2014 to 2022 across redlined U.S. cities and found a dose-responsive relationship between HOLC grade and present-day firearm death. Krieger and Swope (2025), writing in the American Journal of Public Health, refined the picture further, arguing that HOLC maps are symptoms, not causes; the engine is racialized capital, of which redlining was one instrument among many. Either way, the empirical floor is firm: the line drawn at 79th Street in 1940 has been answering its mail for decades.

Eight children died on the line itself. That is not coincidence. That is a longitudinal data point.

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What 1988 Built, What 2026 Tested

Cedar Grove has carried this kind of weight before. On the night of September 20, 1988, Tamala Vergo, a 17-year-old white teenager from Greenwood, fired a chrome-plated revolver from the passenger seat of an idling car in the parking lot of a convenience store at the edge of A.B. Palmer Park. One bullet struck a fence post. The other killed William David McKinney, a 20-year-old Black bystander who had been hanging out at the park with friends (State v. Vergo, 1992). The neighborhood had already been simmering for weeks: only a short time earlier, Jason Willis, a young white man, had killed a Black teenager named Darren Lewis at the Hot Biscuit — with a gun, KTBS-TV reported, supplied to him on the scene by his father. Charges against a Willis family member had been dropped just hours before the McKinney shooting.

What followed was five hours of looting and burning. Two stores were torched. A KTBS news truck was set on fire. Approximately 50 shots were fired at police and firefighters. State Sen. Greg Tarver said publicly what state senators do not usually say publicly: Shreveport is still a racist city. Mayor John Hussey convened a Biracial Commission within days. Tamala Vergo was eventually convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years. Jason Willis was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years and six months without parole.

And then the neighborhood did what it has always done. It built. The KTBS retrospective on the riot’s legacy traces a direct line from the 1988 uprising to a generation of Black civic leadership in Shreveport — including Cedric Glover, who became Shreveport’s first Black mayor in 2006 and traces his own civic engagement back to that night. Rev. Danny Mitchell went on to serve in the Louisiana House of Representatives. The bond program that built recreational centers across the city’s Black neighborhoods was passed two years after the riot, with Glover’s support on the City Council.

Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove (2004) names what cumulative place-based trauma does to a community: the disorientation, the rupture of the emotional ecosystem of a neighborhood, the way grief metabolizes into either civic mobilization or generational withdrawal. Cedar Grove, in 1988, metabolized into mobilization. The neighborhood went to City Hall. The neighborhood produced a mayor. That was Cedar Grove’s answer to a state that did not show up. It cannot be Cedar Grove’s answer alone again. The civic infrastructure built after 1988 was a community filling in for a state that had abandoned its post. In 2026, the state cannot watch that pattern repeat itself with eight more graves and a candlelight vigil and call it resilience. Resilience without resourcing is just exhaustion with better PR.

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The Discharge — A Moment, Not a System

Two weeks before he killed eight children, Shamar Elkins was a patient in a Veterans Affairs hospital. The Washington Post reported that he stayed there a week and a half, prompted — according to KTBS-TV’s reporting on subsequent coroner-office disclosures — by a prior suicide attempt. He was discharged. His brother-in-law Troy Brown, who buried his own son Mar’Kaydon among the eight, told NBC News that Elkins came home and was happy.

A discharge is a moment. It is not a system. A week and a half is not the duration of a recovery from the specific kind of crisis that brings a 31-year-old veteran to inpatient mental health care after an attempt on his own life. What the VA, the state, and the city owe Cedar Grove now is a full accounting of what was — or was not — in place to catch a prohibited person with a prior mental health crisis once he walked back out into a volatile home. Continuity of care is not a deliverable. It is the difference between a discharge and a death sentence.

Bandura (1999) gives us part of the psychological architecture. Moral disengagement is the cognitive process by which a person who holds himself out as a loving father, a devoted husband, a man of God — and Elkins was described in all three terms by his own family — becomes capable of acts that contradict every one of those self-concepts. Bandura’s mechanisms include moral justification (this is for them), euphemistic labeling (taking them with me), advantageous comparison, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, and, critically, dehumanization of the victim. The wife who wanted out becomes the betrayer. The children become extensions of her betrayal. The man with the gun becomes the protagonist of a story in which he is delivering them rather than ending them. None of this is exotic. It is, in the literature, ordinary.

hooks (2004) gives us the cultural architecture. The thesis in The Will to Change is unflinching: patriarchal masculinity teaches boys to amputate emotional language as the price of admission to manhood, and the cost is paid not by the boys but by the women and children around them when the unprocessed pain finally arrives. Black masculinity in postindustrial America, hooks argues, carries this amputation under additional racialized weight — the imperative to be strong, to provide, to never appear weak in a society predisposed to read Black male vulnerability as either threat or pathology. The VA hospital is one of very few institutions where a Black man can walk in and say I want to die without the encounter being routed through a police vehicle. He walked in. He said the words. The system gave him a week and a half.

Tyler (2003) closes the loop institutionally. The argument, distilled: people comply with institutions when they trust those institutions to treat them fairly. When the VA discharges a man in active crisis after a week and a half, the next man who needs help has reason to wonder whether help will arrive. When a 2019 firearms felony does not prevent a 2026 firearms killing, the public has reason to wonder whether prohibition is enforced or merely promised. Procedural justice is not a soft variable. It is the wall that holds when the storm comes. Cedar Grove’s wall has been load-bearing for a very long time.

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How Cedar Grove Copes

On a Monday night, a block from where the children died, the community held a vigil. Renada Soul, a Cedar Grove resident, told the gathered crowd that her own father had killed her mother when she was six years old. She did not say it for performance. She said it because the woman in the hospital bed up the road needed to know that another woman who had survived her own version of this had walked through it and was still standing in front of her neighbors with a candle in her hand. That is not a coping strategy you can write into a county hazard plan. That is a community holding its old grief and its fresh grief in the same hand and refusing to drop either.

Pastor Marty T. Johnson Sr. led the prayers. Councilman James Green spoke. The organizer Satonia Small held the program together. Troy Brown, the father of Mar’Kaydon — who had just lost his ten-year-old son among the cousins — hugged a child who walked up to him with a stuffed animal. None of those gestures will be written into a state report. All of them are the actual infrastructure of how Cedar Grove will get from this Sunday to next Sunday.

This is what hooks (2000) called the love ethic in action — not love as sentiment but love as practice, the conscious decision to care for one another in conditions that are designed to break that capacity. Cedar Grove is doing that work. The state should be embarrassed at how often it gets to externalize the cost of its own failures onto neighborhoods that keep producing care without funding.

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Pattern Hunters See This Clearly

The pattern is the geography drawn in 1940 and never redrawn. The pattern is the firearms felony that did not bar what it was written to bar. The pattern is the law that requires a piece of paper before it will protect a woman from the man who has been telling her for years that he will kill her. The pattern is the state that loosens its own gun laws while the country watches the killings climb, and then preempts the cities that would have legislated differently. The pattern is the VA discharge a week and a half into a crisis that needed months. The pattern is the 1988 riot that built a generation of Black leadership because the state did not. The pattern is the candlelight that lit Cedar Grove on Monday night.

Pattern Hunters is about the community. So what we say and what we write must be different always. It is not just about the pattern. It is about the people. Without the people, we have no patterns — and the people of Cedar Grove are why this story cannot be allowed to cycle out.

I pray for the children, whose blood will continue to cry out for justice that is not available to them. I pray for the mothers who will not be receiving cards and hugs of love from their children on Mother’s Day. I pray for the community that will continue to mourn this loss for years to come. I pray for the father’s soul, and I know that is the hardest prayer.

And then we wake up.

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References

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

Dholakia, A., Burdick, K. J., Kreatsoulas, C., Monuteaux, M. C., Tsai, J., Subramanian, S. V., & Fleegler, E. W. (2024). Historical redlining and present-day nonsuicide firearm fatalities. Annals of Internal Medicine, 177(5), 592–597. https://doi.org/10.7326/M23-2496

Fullilove, M. T. (2004). Root shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it. New York University Press.

Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press.

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.

hooks, b. (2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. Atria Books.

Karlsson, L. C., Antfolk, J., Putkonen, H., Amon, S., da Silva Guerreiro, J., de Vogel, V., Flynn, S., & Weizmann-Henelius, G. (2021). Familicide: A systematic literature review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 22(1), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838018821955

Kraus, N. T., Connor, S., Shoda, K., Moore, S. E., & Irani, E. (2024). Historic redlining and health outcomes: A systematic review. Public Health Nursing, 41(2), 287–296. https://doi.org/10.1111/phn.13276

Krieger, N., & Swope, C. B. (2025). How and why does redlining matter for present-day health? Critical perspectives on causality, cartography, and capitalism. American Journal of Public Health, 115(5), 769–779. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.308000

Lipsitz, G. (2018). The possessive investment in whiteness: How White people profit from identity politics (Rev. ed.). Temple University Press.

McLindon, E., Kyei-Nimakoh, M., Giles, F. C., FitzPatrick, K. M., Tarzia, L., & Hegarty, K. (2025). Timelines of psychological, physical and sexual intimate partner violence among a nationally representative sample of Australian women. Women’s Health, 21, Article 17455057251329640. https://doi.org/10.1177/17455057251329640

Monckton-Smith, J. (2020). Intimate partner femicide: Using Foucauldian analysis to track an eight stage progression to homicide. Violence Against Women, 26(11), 1267–1285. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801219863876

Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright.

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.

State v. Vergo, 594 So. 2d 1360 (La. App. 2d Cir. 1992).

Tyler, T. R. (2003). Procedural justice, legitimacy, and the effective rule of law. Crime and Justice, 30, 283–357. https://doi.org/10.1086/652233

United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. ___ (2024).

U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Louisiana. (2026, April). Shreveport man federally charged for possessing the gun used in a mass shooting that killed 8 children [Press release].

Yardley, E., Wilson, D., & Lynes, A. (2014). A taxonomy of male British family annihilators, 1980–2012. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 53(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12033

Statutes

Gun Control Act, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) (1968).

Lautenberg Amendment, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9) (1996).

La. R.S. 40:1796 (firearms preemption).

La. Acts 2024, 1st Extraordinary Session, Act 2 (permitless concealed carry).

News reporting cited

KTBS-TV. (2024). Remembering the 1988 Cedar Grove riot [70th Anniversary retrospective].

KTBS-TV. (2026, April). Questions linger in Shreveport mass shooting as investigation into gunman’s death continues.

NBC News. (2026, April). Officials probing how Louisiana gunman who killed 8 children got the weapon.

The New York Times. (2026, April). [Reporting on family statements regarding prior threats and Easter Sunday call.]

The Washington Post. (2026, April 20). Louisiana gunman had sought mental health treatment, relatives say.

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Policy Brief — By Request Only

A companion Pattern Hunters Policy Brief on the Cedar Grove case — including model statutory language for a Louisiana coercive-control bill, a state-preemption reform proposal, a continuity-of-care accountability matrix for the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Louisiana Department of Health, and recommended action items for the Louisiana Domestic Abuse Fatality Review Panel — is available by request only to qualified policymakers, legislators, advocacy organizations, and journalists. Inquiries: andrea@patternhunters.com.

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Andrea Hagan is a criminology instructor at Loyola University New Orleans and the founder of Pattern Hunters, LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement, and accountability. Further information is available at patternhunters.com.