Police tape runs across 79th Street in Shreveport, La., Sunday, April 19, 2026, as police work at the scene of a mass shooting. (Jill Pickett/The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate via AP)

SHREVEPORT, La. (AP) — A gunman in Louisiana killed eight children, including seven of his own, and shot two other people Sunday in an attack of domestic violence carried out across two houses, authorities said, shaking a Shreveport neighborhood in the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in more than two years.

Those killed ranged in age from 1 to about 12 years old, and one of the adults wounded was the mother of the suspect’s children, said Shreveport Police spokesperson Chris Bordelon. The suspect, whom Bordelon identified as Shamar Elkins, died after a police pursuit.

Investigators did not say what may have set off the violence. Bordelon said there was still much to investigate but that detectives were confident the shooting was “entirely a domestic incident.”

“This is an extensive scene unlike anything most of us have ever seen,” Bordelon said.

He said Elkins had been known to police and was arrested in 2019 in a firearms case. Officials were not aware of any other domestic violence issues.

Officers fired at the suspect during a chase after he carjacked a vehicle at gunpoint, Bordelon said.

Police said the attacks began before sunrise in a neighborhood south of downtown Shreveport when the suspect shot a woman at one home and then drove to the other location “where this heinous act was carried out.”

Seven children were killed inside the second house, and one was found dead on the roof after apparently trying to escape, Bordelon said.

State Rep. Tammy Phelps said some children tried to get away through the back door. “I can’t even imagine what the police officers, first responders actually dealt with when they got here today,” she said at a news conference.

The two wounded women were in critical condition, officials said.

A neighbor wakes up to a mass shooting

Liza Demming, who lives two houses down from where most of the victims were shot, said her security camera captured video of the suspect running away along with the sound of two shots.

“That’s pretty much all I saw, was him running out of the house and the cars leaving,” she said.

Demming later went outside and saw the covered body of a child on the home’s roof. She said she did not know the gunman’s name.

“He looks like the dad that comes over here,” she said, adding that he was just with the children a few days ago.

Pastor Marty T. Johnson Sr., of nearby St. Gabriel Community Baptist Church, who owns one of the homes where the shootings occurred, said a person who works for him had rented it to the family, but he never had dealings with them.

“I don’t really know them, I really don’t,” he said. “I do plan on having a prayer vigil for the family, and anything I can do, with so many children, to help them bury the children, I’m going to do so.”

The Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office released a statement on Sunday saying it was not yet releasing any of the children’s names because identification of the victims was pending.

“What began as a domestic dispute has ended in irreversible harm,” the parish’s district attorney’s office said in a statement.

Shreveport is overwhelmed by grief

It was the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since eight people were killed in a Chicago suburb in January 2024, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.