Standing on the threshold of grief, documenting the bedrooms of kids killed in school shootings
I never wanted to be this kind of reporter, knocking on the door of someone who lost a child in a school shooting. And yet there I stood, knocking, nonetheless.
I found myself here, standing on the threshold of grief across the country, after years of pent-up frustration. By 2018, America's school shooting epidemic had taken a toll on me. There were so many that the news coverage felt like a treadmill. It seemed to me the country had grown numb and lost its empathy for the victims and the families. I wanted to do something.
For help, I reached out to Lou Bopp, one of the best still photographers in the country. But he said he had never faced a challenge quite like this: "to take a portrait of a person who's not there."
On March 27, 2023, Chad and Jada Scruggs lost their daughter, Hallie, in the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. She was 9 years old, the youngest of four, and their only daughter.
Looking back at photos of Hallie, Chad recalled how she loved sports and had "more stitches than any of her brothers."
"It was just a lot of fun having a daughter," Jada said.
"We had a chance to have her for 9 and a half years, and that was far better than not having her at all," Chad said.
But their goodbye isn't quite complete. They're still living with her bedroom.
Over the past six years, eight families from five school shootings invited us into these sacred spaces, allowing Americans to see what it's like to live with an empty child's bedroom.
We traveled to Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, including 9-year-old Jackie Cazares.
Jackie's parents Javier and Gloria say people are always telling them that they can't imagine what they're going through. But they say we need to imagine, and that's why they invited us in.
"It just makes everything more real for the public, for the world," Gloria said. "Her room completely just speaks of who she was."
In Jackie's room, we saw the chocolate she saved for a day that never came, evidence of the dream vacation she never got to take, and the pajamas she never wore again.
It struck us how many of the rooms remained virtually untouched, years after the shooting.
Frank and Nancy Blackwell lost their 14-year-old son Dominic in the Saugus High School tragedy near Los Angeles. That was 2019, but inside his room, it felt like it was yesterday.
"We just decided to keep everything as it was from when he last went to school that day," Frank said. "He didn't prepare his room to be photographed. He didn't put away his stuffed animals because he was worried about who might see it. He woke up, he got dressed, and he left to go to school. And he thought he was coming back. And we all expected him to come back."
So many rooms wait for a child that will never return.
Charlotte Bacon was murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, six weeks after Halloween. Her room holds the last library book the 6-year-old checked out, now 12 years overdue.
Luke Hoyer, 15, was killed in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine's Day in 2018. When we visited his home, his bed was just as he left it.
Alyssa Alhadeff, 14, was also killed in the Parkland shooting. The whirlwind that was her room had fallen still.
Carmen Schentrup was yet another Parkland victim. The watch she got for her 16th birthday still ticks, but the motivational sayings that filled her room resonate no more.
The decision to either keep a room as it was or pack it up and repurpose it tortures many parents.
Bryan and Cindy Muhlberger lost their 15-year-old daughter, Gracie, in the Saugus shooting. They told us they often talk about what to do with her room.
"Because when I do go in there, I feel her presence," Cindy told us.
Bryan wondered, "And so when that time comes that the room is not there, does she go away?"
I didn't realize what an albatross the rooms are for some families.
"I will just say I have a pretty confusing relationship with [Hallie's] room now," Chad said. It's extremely painful, but there's a lot of moments where you want to be sad — because the sadness is a part of connecting with her."
Hallie's room also brings them smiles, too, Chad and Jada told us as they showed us a kitty cat hoodie that Hallie wore all the time.
The rooms really are a rainbow of emotion, all at once tender as a lullaby and shocking as a crime scene. Clues gather dust, leading us past all the places these kids had been up until that very moment when everything stopped so suddenly that there wasn't even time to close the lid on the toothpaste tube.
In the end, we took more than 10,000 photographs. These parents hope that at least one of these pictures will stick with you, that you will forever carry a piece of their pain and use that heartache to stem the tide of all these empty rooms.
