If you or someone you love is experiencing domestic violence, call The National Domestic Abuse Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or visit www.thehotline.org. If you or someone you know needs mental health resources and support, please call, text, or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit 988lifeline.org for 24/7 access to free and confidential services.
Even in a nation accustomed to gun violence and mass shootings, news of a Louisiana father killing his own children left Americans in shock.
How could he? How could any parent?
There is a name for the crime police sayShamar Elkinscommitted when he fatally shot eight children in Shreveport on April 19: filicide, or the killing of a child by their parent.
Parents, not strangers, are predominantly the killers: Some 500 American parents are arrested for the crime each year, according to a June 2023 article in the journal Current Psychiatry. That number doesn't include the many such killings that end with parents taking their own lives.
Often, those child deaths are a result of abuse or neglect. More rare are cases like the one in Shreveport. Police said Elkins shot the mother of his children and another woman, as well as his seven children and one of their cousins, in a Sunday morning rampage that ended in his death.
This is the largest such case in at least 20 years, according to a review ofa mass killings databaseby USA TODAY, the Associated Press and Northeastern University research professor of criminology James Alan Fox.
Fox, who has studied mass killings in America since the 1980s, could remember only one family mass killing that was more deadly: the 1987 murders byRonald Gene Simmonsof 16 people in Arkansas. Simmons methodically killed 14 of his family members over seven days before Christmas, including his adult children and eight children and grandchildren.
The media dubbed Simmonsthe "devil of Pope County."He was tried, sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection in 1990.
"Our homes should be places of safety and our parents people who you should trust never to harm you," said Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a forensic psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals. "I think that is why (filicide) can be so shocking."
Why parents kill their own kids
Forensic psychiatristDr. Phillip Resnickis widely regarded as the first to conduct a broad study of the crime. In the 1960s, he reviewed dozens of cases around the world and wrote a foundational paper on the reasons why parents kill their children.
Hatters Friedman, who studied under Resnick at Case Western, explained the four main motives:
-
Fatal maltreatment. In these cases, the child has often been a victim of chronic abuse or neglect, she said.
-
Unwanted child. Babies, especially after an unwanted or hidden pregnancy, are at the greatest risk.
-
Partner revenge. An impending break-up, infidelity, or a custody battle might be present. In these cases, "the father or mother is trying to punish, or emotionally harm, the other parent," Hatters Friedman said. "They are seeing the child as a pawn."
-
Acutely psychotic. This motive is sometimes also known as an "altruistic" killing, in which the parent is severely depressed and has "developed delusions that something worse than death is going to happen to their child," she said.
Filicide is the only type of homicide in which men and women kill at roughly the same rates, she said; men are by far the more frequent culprits of other types of homicide. One difference: Fathers who kill their children are more likely to die by suicide.
The 'devil of Pope County'
Ronald Gene Simmons was a decorated Vietnam veteran with 22 years of military service when he undertook one of the country's most horrendous family massacres.
Advertisement
Simmons had been accused of sex crimes in New Mexico and moved his family to a compound in Russellville, Arkansas, to evade authorities, according toreporting by ABC Channel 40/29 News.
Two days before Christmas 1987, Simmons killed his wife, adult son and 3-year-old granddaughter and dumped their bodies in a shallow pit that had been dug for an outhouse.
Later that afternoon, as they got home from school, he killed four more Simmons children and piled their bodies in the outhouse hole, the ABC 40/29 report says.
The rampage continued on the day after Christmas as he murdered his other adult children, their spouses and his grandchildren as they arrived for the holiday.
It wasn't until Dec. 28 that Simmons went into town, bought a new gun at Walmart and shot half a dozen more people, killing two, before he held a woman at gunpoint and forced her to call the police.
Child deaths in Louisiana
Homicide is the No. 1 cause of injury-related deaths of children in Louisiana, according to the state's latestChild Death Review Panel report, followed by car accidents, drownings and suicide.
From 2020 through 2022, 118 children were the victims of homicide in Louisiana, according to the panel's most recent report. Among children one year and older who died by homicide, 63% were killed by firearms. The study didn't break down how many of the firearms-related homicides were by a parent.
Elkins reportedly was struggling with an impending separation from his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh. Elkins and Pugh were scheduled to appear in court on April 20 in the matter, the day after the shooting, Crystal Brown, a cousin of one of the women who was wounded in the shooting, told theAssociated Press.
A previous partner, Christina Snow, sued Elkins for child support and was granted joint custody of their child, Sariahh, in 2017, court records show. Sariahh, 11, was among those killed in the shooting.
The victims included Jayla Elkins, 3; Shayla Elkins, 5; Kayla Pugh, 6; Layla Pugh, 7; Markaydon Pugh, 10; Sariahh Snow, 11; Khedarrion Snow, 6; and Braylon Snow, 5.
Elkins' stepfather, Marcus Jackson, toldThe New York Timesthat his stepson said during a call on Easter Sunday that his wife wanted a divorce. Elkins said that he wanted to take his own life and that he was dealing with “dark thoughts," Jackson told the newspaper.
Dr. John Thompson, chair of Tulane University's School of Medicine forensic psychiatry program, said while he cannot offer an opinion on the Elkins killing, understanding motives is a complex undertaking.
"It's like trying to profile serial killers, you really don't know what happened unless you know their entire life history," he said.
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Why did Shamar Elkins allegedly kill 8 kids? Experts discuss filicide
