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The documentary “All the Empty Rooms,” which memorialized children killed in school shootings through a look at the bedrooms they never returned to, took home the Oscar for Best Documentary Short at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday.
The film follows CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp along their seven-year journey to document the toll of America’s school shooting epidemic. Director Joshua Seftel accepted the Oscar on stage alongside Hartman, producer Conall Jones and Gloria Cazares, whose daughter Jackie was killed in the Uvalde school shooting in 2022.
“The four empty rooms in our film belonged to four young children who were all killed in school shootings: Hallie, Gracie, Dominic and Jackie,” Seftel told the crowd before passing the mic to Cazares.
Wearing red dress and a pin with an image of Jackie, Cazares spoke of her 9-year-old daughter and appealed for an end to gun violence.
“Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time,” Cazares said. “Jackie is more than just a headline. She is our light and our life. Gun violence is now the number one cause of death in kids and teens. We believe that if the world could see their empty bedrooms, we’d be a different America.”
Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
When Hartman traveled to Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, Cazares told him that people are always telling her that they can’t imagine what she’s going through. But she said we need to imagine, and that’s why she invited Hartman and Bopp into her home.
“It just makes everything more real for the public, for the world,” Carazes said at the time. “Her room completely just speaks of who she was.”
In Jackie’s room, there was the chocolate she had saved for a day that never came, and an “About Me” chalkboard where she wrote that she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up.
Many of the children’s rooms, like Jackie’s, remained virtually untouched, years after the shootings.
“Their personalities shone through in the smallest details of their untouched rooms — hair ties on a doorknob, a toothpaste tube left uncapped, a ripped ticket for a school event — allowing me to uncover glimpses as to who they were,” Bopp said in an essay about the project in 2024.
Explore the rooms:
Unmade beds and overdue books: Photographing the rooms of kids killed in school shootings
More from CBS “Sunday Morning”:
Standing on the threshold of grief, documenting the bedrooms of kids killed in school shootings
