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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.
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…
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