This is an updated version of a story first published on Nov. 23, 2025. The original video can be viewed here. Since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 14 years ago, more than 170 children have been killed in school shootings across the U.S. They've left behind devastated families, and friends, and empty bedrooms they once filled with life. For many parents, these rooms have become sanctuaries: a tangible link to a child they can still feel but no longer hold. As we first told you last year, Steve Hartman, a veteran CBS News correspondent, and Lou Bopp, a photographer, have spent the last eight years asking parents whose children have been killed for permission to take pictures of the empty rooms they've left behind. No easy task; they are, after all, portraits of a child who is no longer there.Up a flight of stairs in their Nashville home, Chad and Jada Scruggs took us to see their daughter Hallie's room. It remains as she left it one Monday morning three years ago.Chad Scruggs: I don't think anything's changed.How a daughter's words inspired her surviving parents to embrace lifeHallie Scruggs loved Legos, Tennessee football, and hiding things in a toy safe from her three older brothers. The books she and her mom read together at night are still stacked by her bed. A school project, with important milestones in her life, a reminder Hallie was just 9 years old.Chad Scruggs: First tooth, first soccer game, first Tennessee game. Anderson Cooper: That was a-- that was a-- a milestone.
Memorializing the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings: "She was real. She was here."
For many parents of children killed in school shootings, bedrooms left behind are a devastating reminder of what was taken. Several parents share an emotional look inside these empty rooms.
CBS correspondent Steve Hartman documented eight years of bedrooms of 170+ children killed in U.S. school shootings since Sandy Hook. The project counters media amnesia on tragedies, preserving individual grief narratives that shape public discourse beyond brief news cycles.







