A New Documentary Goes Inside the Untouched Bedrooms of School Shooting Victims

For close to two decades, CBS News reporter Steve Hartman has been responsible for finding uplifting stories in a news cycle dominated by tragedy and alarm. The hardest part by far, he says, has been covering school shootings, an epidemic that’s only continued to increase in the U.S. since the infamous 1999 Columbine school shooting. (In 2025 alone, there have been 70 school shootings, CNN reports.) This focus on uplifting angles, whether that was an unexpected hero or a story of a devastated community banding together to take care of each other, worked for ratings — but it left Hartman exhausted. 

“I was frustrated with the country, and I guess mostly with myself, because after each school shooting, I felt like I was growing more and more numb. We would move on after every school shooting, like, ‘Oh, there’s another one,’” Hartman tells Rolling Stone. “And our mourning period was shrinking from weeks to days to sometimes hours. I started just racking my brain to what I could do to restore people’s empathy, to restore my own empathy, and not be numb anymore to these tragedies. And that’s when I started thinking about the bedrooms that these kids left behind.” 

The result is Netflix’s new documentary All The Empty Rooms, which follows Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they interview and document bedrooms left behind by school shooting victims. Directed by Joshua Seftel (Stranger At The Gate), All The Empty Rooms isn’t an easy watch, even with its relatively short runtime of just 35 minutes. The documentary doesn’t mention any school shooters by name. In fact, it barely mentions guns at all. Instead, the camera follows Hartman as he interviews the parents in their child’s bedroom, and while Bopp takes photos. In between the still shots from Bopp’s camera, family members point out their favorite memories and talk about their loved one. 

Some of the bedrooms have been preserved like they’re simply waiting for their person to return from a trip, while others have become shrines dedicated to the adults these children never got to be. “In some rooms, it looks like somebody was just there — the room’s kind of a mess, and in the bathroom there’s a hair brush on the floor or on the counter the toothpaste cap is off,” Bopp says. “Literally, you can feel their presence.” 

But in every case, the empty rooms — and the parents who have preserved them — show a difficult reminder of the reality of school shootings. And for all the shuttered bedrooms we see on screen, there will inevitably be more. 

“Imagine what it must be like for a parent to return home at the end of that horrible day and walk into that space surrounded by everything that their child held dear, all their dreams and joys and memories on all four walls and on every countertop,” Hartman says. “If America could stand in that space, it might be a lot harder to move on and forget.”

Hartman, Bopp, and Seftel all believe we can learn a lot about a child through what their bedroom looks like. Dominic Blackwell was 14 years old when he was shot and killed at Santa Clarita’s Saugus High School on Nov. 14, 2019. But after the news coverage ended, his parents kept his bedroom perfectly intact. “It’s basically the same,” his mother Nancy Blackwell says in the film, taking Hartman through the SpongeBob SquarePants memorabilia covering his bed, walls, and shelves. There are football medals on the door handle, Dodgers merch in the closet, and even a basket of dirty clothes. “I don’t think we wanted to lose his smell in his room,” she says. “Because it’s distinctly him.” 

As a director, Seftel knew All The Empty Rooms would be difficult to make and even harder for audiences to watch. But he says he was interested in the idea because he thought it might let people connect with victims and their families on a more human level, helping them see these deaths as more than just statistics. “It’s so easy to turn away from headlines,” he says. “And I just felt like if we could make people feel something by being in these rooms, that would have value for the people who are watching, for the families and maybe for the issue of gun violence and school shootings.” Bopp still gets emotional trying to talk about the experience of walking into those bedrooms. “It’s the behind the scenes [of] what happens after the news cycle is done. And I hope it pisses people off,” he says, choking up. “I hope it drives people crazy.”

Making the documentary took over seven years, in part because Hartman wanted to make sure that none of the families involved felt like they were being coerced into participating. The reporter sent handwritten notes to every family of a school shooting victim since Columbine, and even when they said yes, talked through it with them several times before agreeing to photograph their child’s room. Of the eight families who responded, four ended up in the film. 

For Bopp, these empty rooms were sacred spaces for the families, havens he didn’t want to disrespect while he was shooting. Every time he entered one, he took off his shoes, and was careful not to adjust a single thing in his effort to frame the photos. He describes his process like a careful treasure hunt for clues as to who the child was. “I’m looking for details. I’m looking for clues, hunting like Sherlock Holmes. Every room was pretty simple to tell a story, because every room had its own personality,” Bopp says. 

Aside from Blackwell, the documentary also gives viewers a look at the bedrooms of three other school shooting victims. Nine-year-old Hallie Scruggs, who was killed in the Covenant School Shooting in Nashville on March 27, 2023 is littered with seashells she collected, Play-Doh, Lego figurines, pictures of herself and her family, and finished school projects. Nine-year-old Jackie Cazaras, a student killed at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, had a Paris-themed bedroom, complete with an Eiffel Tower bedspread. Her parents, Javier and Gloria Cazares, keep her stuffed animals and teddy bears in neat rows on her bed, while noting how sure they are that Jackie would have eventually had a job with animals if she had survived. 

There are still clothes for the week laid out in the room of 15-year-old Gracie Mulhberger, who was killed alongside Blackwell at Saugus High on Nov. 14, 2019. In between photos of friends and trinkets, her parents found a keepsake box filled with letters addressed to her older self. “In every one, there’s a sense of the world moving on, and this room is stagnant,” Seftel says. “You can even hear sometimes, birds outside or kids playing or a lawnmower. There’s something about that that underscores the idea that this room is separate from everything else that’s going on. It’s fixed in amber.”