CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman has been reporting on school shootings in the U.S. since 1997, starting with a shooting at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss., two years before the largest school shooting of its time at Columbine High School.
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In an effort to honor their memories, Hartman began documenting the bedrooms of school-shooting victims for a multimedia project published by CBS News on Nov. 17, 2024, and featured in All the Empty Rooms, a documentary short releasing on Netflix Dec. 1.
Over the course of about seven years, eight families who lost children in five different school shootings invited Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp into their homes, where they took more than 10,000 photographs. The short film shows Bopp photographing under beds and drawers, making sure he covers every part of the room.
Here’s the story behind the 30-minute short, which follows Hartman and Bopp as they document three bedrooms that belonged to school-shooting victims.
A room of one’s own
Viewers will see the SpongeBob SquarePants-themed bedroom of 14-year-old Dominic Blackwell, one of two teens killed in a 2019 shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif. The room is as much a shrine to SpongeBob as it is, now, to Blackwell, who collected memorabilia of the character.
There is a laundry basket filled with clothes that haven’t been washed since he died more than five years ago, except for the socks and underwear. “We didn’t want to lose his smell in his room because it’s distinctly him,” his mother Nancy says.
Other featured parents tried to leave their deceased children’s rooms mostly as they were to preserve their smell as well. Chad Scruggs, father of Hallie Scruggs, a 9-year-old killed in the 2023 Covenant school shooting in Nashville, Tenn., misses her smell, including her sweaty hair, and finds her bed is the closest he can get to that. His wife Jada, meanwhile, periodically goes in to smell the blanket that Hallie slept with every night. Her hoodie sweatshirt with photographs of cats all over it is still in perfect condition.
The family of 9-year-old Jackie Cazares, one of the 19 children and two teachers killed in the 2022 Robb Elementary School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has left her bedroom so intact that they have not even turned off the lights in the room since she died. There is one addition to the room: a chair next to her bed that her father Javier sits in every day. Two stuffed animals in the room play her voice when you squeeze them.
Cindy Muehlberger, whose daughter Gracie was 15 when she, like Blackwell, was killed in the 2019 shooting at Saugus High School, goes to her daughter’s room each day to say “good morning” and “good night.” Gracie probably would have loved to see her bedroom on display in the doc because she liked to host performances in her room, even doing somersaults off of the bed. She’d pass out invitations to family members and set up chairs. In the room, a dress she was going to wear to a school dance is still hanging on a hanger, along with a box of notes she wrote to her future self, telling her to “wear something cute obviously” on the first day of high school and “don’t be nervous. You will meet some of your lifelong friends and also some enemies. Don’t focus on the negativity.”
The takeaway
In nearly 30 years of covering school shootings for CBS News, Hartman—best known for his human interest stories—has usually been tasked with doing segments that helps viewers stay optimistic. “I’ve been typecast as the feel-good, happy news type of guy. I’m the guy they bring in at the end to restore people’s faith in humanity,” he says in the film.
But those segments became harder to do as more school shootings occurred.
“What I’ve been doing is just whitewashing the whole thing. Imagine that: trying to find good news at a school shooting and a lot of mass shootings. That’s been my job. At the end of the week, remind us that life is still worth living. I’m not going to look at a school shooting and find some positive angle to that, not anymore.”
He also felt like viewers tuned out those segments: “America was kind of moving on from each school shooting quicker and quicker every time. I felt like I’ve got to do something different. What can I do?”
He thinks news outlets give the shooters too much air time, so his project is a way of trying to re-focus attention on the victims: “The whole point of this is to not have to say much. I just want people to see the pictures and just let the pictures speak for themselves.”
The short ends with Hartman reflecting, “I wish that we could transport all Americans to stand in one of those bedrooms for just a few minutes. We’d be a different America.”
The post A Sobering New Documentary Goes Inside the Bedrooms of School-Shooting Victims appeared first on TIME.
