Unraveling: Rage & Loss in Louisiana

A third of the year has gone by. Spring is here and soon we’ll be moving towards Summer. We’ll be looking forward to vacations, barbecues, swimming pools, family gatherings, but we’ll also be privy to a violence that seems to follow along with the heat and encroach upon us. These warmer months seem to make us yearn for release, and sometimes in letting go we lose control in the most tragic and consequential ways. A third of the year has gone by—there’s more sunlight and heat, but this week we are also left shuddering at the violence that overtook a sleepy little town in Louisiana called Shreveport. One where the community is left to grapple with the deadliest mass shooting in two years. A rampage that resulted in the death of eight children. 

People can be insensitive in how they go about satisfying their constant wish to be entertained, but as desensitized as we sometimes are, the thought of children losing their lives is still unsettling to us. It is one of the few tragedies capable of transforming our collective appetite for entertainment fodder into collective shock and grief. 

A Mind in Decline

The facts as they have been reported indicate that all of this destruction stemmed from a dissolution, a conflict or conflicts that could not be resolved and resulted in the ending of a relationship. I doubt we will ever be free of such things, lover’s quarrels and all the stress and pain that they engender, but I do know that no quarrel between lovers should ever end in murder. Most don’t, but most still leaves far too many occurrences. 

I want to consider Shamar Elkins, the man who perpetrated this, not to cover him in compassion or excuse his sins—I have no interest in that, and not to flatten and erase him with narrow opinions of who he was and what he did, but to understand what he represents.

There was at least some self-awareness of the fact that he was struggling mentally. He checked himself into a facility in January. Maybe he received a modicum of care, but most mental health hospitals are only designed for short-term treatment and immediate stabilization of symptoms. They are not designed for long-term treatment with the goal of helping patients engage in meaningful depth-based psychological work that is necessary to address deeper psychological problems and improve mental health outcomes. 

Like most people in those situations, Elkins was granted a short reprieve from the stressors of his life before having to return to them and was ill-equipped to handle them. It’s likely that some of these stressors were self-created, but there is still something crushing about reaching out to ask for help only to be brought back to the same problems and insurmountable consequences that brought you low in the first place. This is especially the case for men who are loath to humble themselves and admit that they are struggling. 

Shortly thereafter, like many other men in these situations, Elkins seems to have abandoned the idea of ever being helped again by another person. His reaching out became public pleas for God to guard his mind and help him reject “depression, anger, anxiety, and panic.”  There is an arrogance also hidden inside of the humility that allows one to rely on their faith for assistance—one that covertly expresses the belief that only a divine source is capable of helping me, not another human being. Neither arrogance or divinity prevented Elkins from trying to kill himself in February, and shortly thereafter, threatening his wife that he would try again to kill himself and their entire family if she followed through with her attempt to leave him. 

There were signs that something bad could happen, but it is difficult to believe that it could ever come to this. His descent is hard to fathom, but we know now that he was clearly a man who was spiraling out of control. A week of mental health care might have forestalled the outcome, but it was not sufficient enough to prevent it. To get and stay mentally healthy requires maintenance and upkeep, otherwise we are all vulnerable to dysfunction, especially during the most difficult seasons of our lives. 

The Cost

The most egregious aspect of all of this is the fact that children’s lives were either lost or changed forever. Eight children were taken. Only a 12-year old child escaped, and I wonder what exactly did she escape to? Certainly not to safety. Her life is forever altered by these events, and the fight to reclaim some level of peace and stability will be long and arduous. 

“I’ve lost eight parts of me.” 

That’s what Troy Brown, the father of the lone surviving child had to say about the rest of those “precious babies” he helped take care of, the ones who are now gone away. 

It is difficult to understand the kind of rage that drives a man to snuff out innocence, but we know that it must be dark and cruel and terrible. It must exist outside the confines of human decency and it must be just as abhorrent as it is vicious. 

Louisiana is as much my ancestral home as any other place will ever be. I know it by its contradictions—it is a place defined by its longing and its fullness, its excess and its impoverishment. A place with the best food, the nicest people, and the prettiest women, where de facto segregation still exists, where power is still hoarded, and poverty is still an institution. I am reminded on weeks like this just how unsettling it can be—the combination of all this beauty and terror.

The Governor categorized Elkin’s acts as evil, which is undoubtedly how many people feel, but once again my concern is that doing so flattens and reduces him. It absolves him and our society which produced him of responsibility. To label him as evil forces us to beg the questions of ourselves, how could we expect anything else from evil incarnate?

Sophia Nelson phrased it better when talking about a similarly tragic event that occurred recently. “Domestic violence can occur in any family in any place.” She’s highlighting the fact that domestic violence is a social problem that is endemic, not an isolated act of evil. 

If there is something that is befitting of that designation, it is the all too common belief that a relationship implies ownership. It is only within that framework, that men are able to justify and be excused for denigrating, dominating, and killing women, all in the name of keeping their entitlements.

It’s notable that while much has been said about the kind of mother Elkin’s partner was—caring, doting, loving—very little has been said about who she was as a wife. Even without that history, it’s already clear that whatever her virtues or shortcomings, none of them warranted her and her children being executed. If anything, the silence on the matter is another indictment of the many among us who upon hearing about such incidents first respond by asking, well, what did she do? 

Maybe Shamar Elkins was overcome by some kind of emotional torment, some kind of temporary insanity, but it's clear he was also fueled by something else. A hatred, a sickness, a malice towards women that made him believe that he was entitled to take what was not his. 

Something broke inside of him, little by little, and then all at once, or maybe nothing broke at all and whatever was inside of him was simply revealed. He could not face it so he fled from it instead and now we must, in the absence of the wicked and the innocent, carry this burden, always and forever.