Tragedy in Shreveport :: No Child Should Know This Kind of Goodbye
He wore a uniform once.
He stood in formation, learned discipline, carried responsibility. For a time, Louisiana Army National Guard was part of his identity, service, structure, a life that suggested purpose. There is something deeply unsettling about beginning there, because it forces a question no one wants to ask. How does someone move from serving alongside others to destroying everything that should have mattered most?
As a mother, that question does not just sit in your mind. It burrows into your chest.
Because when you read about what happened in Shreveport, you do not just see headlines or statistics. You see bedrooms. You see small shoes by the door. You hear the echo of laughter that must have filled that house just hours before. You imagine eight children, babies really, ages three to eleven, in the safest place they knew, in the quiet of early morning.
And then you imagine the unthinkable.
The kind of fear no child should ever know.
The kind of betrayal no child could ever understand.
It is almost too much for the mind to hold.
As a mom, your thoughts do not stay organized. They scatter, they spiral. One moment you are picturing your own children asleep in their beds, soft breaths, tangled blankets. The next, your heart is racing because you realize how fragile that safety really is. How trust, pure and unconditional, is placed in the hands of adults who are supposed to protect it at all costs.
Those children did not just lose their lives.
They lost them at the hands of someone who was supposed to be their safety.
That is the part that breaks something deep inside.
We talk about violence, about crime, about tragedy, but this feels like something beyond those words. This feels like a collapse of something sacred. Parenthood is supposed to be the most human thing we do, to nurture, to shield, to love beyond reason. And yet here, in this moment, it became something unrecognizable. Something inhuman.
You try to make sense of it, because that is what we do. We look for reasons, explanations, anything to place this horror somewhere outside the boundaries of our own lives. But there is not a reason that makes this smaller. There is not an explanation that softens the edges.
Eight children.
Eight futures.
Eight lives that should have stretched far beyond a single morning.
Jayla. Shayla. Kayla. Layla. Markaydon. Sariahh. Khedarrion. Braylon.
Say their names slowly, and they stop being part of a news story. They become real. You can almost see them running through the house, arguing over toys, asking for snacks, needing hugs, needing someone to tuck them in at night.
And that is where the grief settles the heaviest, because you know what those ordinary moments mean. You know how sacred they are. The bedtime routines, the small hands reaching for yours, the way a child leans into you without hesitation, believing completely that you will keep them safe.
To lose a child is already an unimaginable pain.
To lose eight, in this way, there are not words that can hold that kind of devastation.
And then there is the other layer, the one that makes your stomach turn. The reality that some people can cross a line so dark, so absolute, that it strips away any sense of shared humanity. It forces you to confront a truth you do not want to accept, that love is not always enough to protect against what exists in another person’s mind.
As a mother, you want to fix it. You want to gather those children up, rewrite the morning, stand between them and harm. But you cannot. All you are left with is grief, and a quiet, aching fear that lingers long after you put your own children to bed.
You check on them again.
You pull the blanket a little higher.
You listen a little longer to make sure they are still breathing softly in the dark.
Because stories like this do not stay on the page.
They follow you home.
And somewhere in Shreveport, eight beds are empty tonight.
That is the part no one can ever make sense of.
