All the Empty Rooms

9/17/2026

I was quite anxious about watching this short feature, uncertain about what I thought might be an almost pruriently macabre job for correspondent Steve Hartman. He is usually the amiable news reporter associated with the more light-hearted "and, finally..." item at the end of a bulletin, but now with his photographer friend Lou Bopp he has embarked on a project to photograph the bedrooms of all of the children slain by gun crime at school. The number of victims has almost quadrupled in recent years, but with only a couple left to do we follow them to the Blackwell, Scruggs and Cazares families where we sit down with their parents and watch some of their home videos and reminisce about their talented and mischievous children before entering bedrooms that in many ways are shrines, untouched