Empty bedrooms tell the story of children killed in school shootings

The beds are made, the walls still hold posters, and the toys sit where children last left them for school. In homes across the country, those preserved bedrooms have become the starkest reminder that a school shooting does not end when the news cycle moves on. They remain as intimate memorials and as evidence of grief that never fully leaves a family.

For seven years, Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp asked parents for permission to photograph the empty rooms of children killed in school shootings. Eight families across five different shootings opened their doors, and Bopp took more than 10,000 photographs. The rooms were often left almost exactly as they were on the day the children walked out the door, and parents described them as sanctuaries that still held their child’s presence. Hartman said the project was meant to shake the country out of numbness to school-shooting headlines.

One of those rooms belonged to Hallie Scruggs in Nashville. Hallie was 9 years old when she was killed on March 27, 2023, in the Covenant School shooting, along with classmates Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney. Her room stands for the longer afterlife of this violence, a place where a child’s ordinary belongings become a permanent measure of what was taken in an instant.

The scale of the crisis gives that private loss national weight. Brady United says that since Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, there have been more than 390 school shootings, killing at least 203 people and injuring 441 others on K-12 campuses. Those numbers explain why the bedrooms matter so much. They put a human face on a tragedy that too often gets reduced to a tally, then buried until the next shooting.

The project later became All the Empty Rooms, which premiered in 2025 and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film. Director Joshua Seftel said families took part because they wanted the world to know their children and to make sure they were not forgotten. In room after room, the message is the same: the loss does not fade when the cameras leave, and the burden of memory stays where the child last slept.