These empty kids’ bedrooms will break your heart

Gracie Muehlberger's room stayed largely unchanged for years after she was killed in a school shooting in November 2019. (Netflix via CNN Newsource)

Gracie Muehlberger wrote letters to her future self and stored them in a multicoloured trinket box on her dresser.

Her notes, penned when she was 13 and signed “Gracie from the past,” bubbled with anticipation about her eighth-grade graduation, her first day of high school and life in college. She also described plans for after she got her licence: to drive with music cranked up and her favourite Starbucks drink – a caramel Frappuccino – in the cup holder.

“Dear future self, OMG, it’s high school. I’ve been waiting for this day for forever,” she wrote in one letter. “Don’t be nervous. You will meet some of your life-long friends and also some enemies. Don’t focus on the negativity. … Wear something cute, obviously. I love you!! Good luck.”

But just weeks into Gracie’s freshman year of high school, those dreams were cut short. In November 2019, a student armed with a pistol opened fire at Saugus High in Santa Clarita, California, killing two students, including Gracie. She was 15.

“There was so much hope for the future,” her father, Bryan Muehlberger, told CNN. “She only spent 15 weeks in high school.”

For years, her room remained mostly unchanged after her death. The pink and black outfit she’d picked for the next day still hung on a rack in a corner. Her retainer sat in her desk drawer, near a Christmas card she’d already made for her mom. Her pink stuffed dog lay on her bed as if waiting for her to come back.

Cindy Muehlberger went into the room every time she wanted to feel her daughter’s presence. But not until weeks after Gracie’s death did she discover the notes.

“Little by little, I would go through drawers and everything. And I didn’t think to open this box on her dresser. But one day I opened it and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, what are these? And it brought me to tears, how she could write these letters to her future self,” she said. “I had no idea that she used to journal or write.”

Gracie’s story – and the belongings she left behind – are part of a Netflix documentary, “All the Empty Rooms,” which premiered this week and takes viewers inside the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings across America.

Over seven years, CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp travelled the country to document bedrooms left largely untouched, capturing intimate portraits of how parents preserve their children’s spaces long after they’re gone.

Part of their sad odyssey is captured in the 35-minute documentary by Joshua Seftel. It chronicles items, and moments, frozen in time: an uncapped tube of toothpaste, an unmade bed, a pile of unwashed laundry and hair ties still looped around a doorknob.

Bopp photographed eight bedrooms, four of which are featured in “All the Empty Rooms.” The four children profiled in the film were between ages 9 and 15.

“After covering these school shootings, … I felt like the whole country was going through that same process of accepting that school shootings are a part of our everyday life, and I started thinking, ‘What could we possibly do to shake people out of that numbness?’” Hartman told CNN.

He began thinking of the bedrooms the departed kids had left behind.

“I started to imagine what it must be like for the parents to return to those rooms at the end of the day. And I wondered, what if all of America stands in those rooms? Would that possibly restore some degree of empathy?”

Hartman and Bopp are both fathers, and the documentary includes snippets of their lives with their own children. After leaving the homes of school shooting victims they sometimes drove away in stunned silence, their eyes brimming with tears.

“All eight rooms that I walked into, I started to hyperventilate. It’s just so powerful thinking about the family that I’m visiting and the child that’s not there,” Bopp said. “One of my goals was to …capture the essence of the child, because every room is different. So personal to that child … their safe space.”

Hartman said the parents he encountered take some solace in seeing their children’s bedrooms preserved and struggle with whether and how to pack up their belongings. “One parent described it to me as agony and comfort all at the same time,” he said.

The documentary intentionally avoids any mention of the word “guns” or discussion of gun control.

“This film has no agenda whatsoever beyond empathy,” Hartman said.

One mom kept her son’s clothes unwashed to preserve his scent

In each child’s bedroom, small details offer glimpses into their passions and personalities.

Dominic Blackwell, 14, the other student killed at Gracie’s school, loved sports and everything SpongeBob. His bed is lined with stuffed animals of the cartoon character with his goofy, gap-toothed smile. Similar figurines sit on floating shelves. Football medals hang from the back of the door.

On a sky-blue bedroom wall, a poster of a SpongeBob sporting angelic wings reads, “RIP Dominic Blackwell.” A gray plastic basket with his dirty laundry sits in a corner, because his mother can’t bring herself to wash away the scent of her son.

“His underwear and socks I pulled out and washed, but everything else is how it was almost five years ago – it’s dirty clothes,” Nancy Blackwell says in the documentary. “I don’t think we wanted to lose his smell in his room because it’s distinctly him.”

In Uvalde, Texas, Jackie Cazares’ room is a splash of purple, with string lights tracing the ceiling like tiny stars. A wrapped piece of chocolate still sits on the dresser.

At the head of the bed is a row of stuffed animals. When you press a button on one teddy bear’s paw, Jackie’s laughter fills the room. Her parents said the audio is from a clip of her rolling around on the ground with a group of dogs. She wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, they said.

A hairbrush nearby still contains wisps of her dark hair.

“Her room, it played a very big role in her life,” her mother, Gloria Cazares, says in the documentary. “That was her safe place.”

Jackie died in May 2022 after an armed teenager killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. She was 9.

Her purple string lights have remained on since she died, her mother says in the film.

‘A lot of crying happens in that room’

Two years later, Hallie Scruggs’ room is just as she left it.

Her red blankie rests on the bed. An assortment of trinkets are strewn across the room, including twin unicorn figurines, a small red safe-like box and a seashell with her name scrawled on it.

A giant teddy bear slumped on the carpet looks heartbreakingly forlorn – as if it knows she’s gone. Inside her closet is one of her prized items — a sweatshirt adorned with kitten faces.

“A lot of crying happens in that room,” her mother Jada Scruggs says in the documentary. She told CNN there are no plans to change Hallie’s room.

Hallie, 9, was the youngest of the Scruggs’ children and the only daughter. She was one of six people killed in March 2023 at the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee.

“She was so full of childlike wonder and energy and joy,” Scruggs said. “She was not content to sit in her room by herself and play with dolls. She got muddy, got dirty was always outside. She loved being around her brothers and her friends.”

Her dad, Chad Scruggs, described her as a “little Punky Brewster.”

One of Hallie’s favourite belongings was the tiny red safe, which she used to lock things away from her older brothers.

“She was kind of quirky that way,” Jada Scruggs said. “She just really loved kind of messing with them.”

A signed University of Tennessee football helmet sits on a shelf. Hallie also loved reading, and one of the last books her mother read to her at bedtime was from C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” series.

Her parents found more books stashed under her bed, including a Bible, along with a karaoke microphone and an old Nike box for soccer cleats.

“One of my favourite parts was looking under her bed, because it’s just a mishmash of things that she either hid or scooted under there when she had to clean her room,” Chad Scruggs told CNN. “It’s just kind of this picture of what she either wanted hidden or got hidden … miscellaneous things that reflect who she is.”

Her parents still lay on her bed sometimes.

“What you want is something that you can’t have,” her dad says in the documentary. “I wanted to touch her. I wanted to feel her sweaty hair. And her bed was the closest thing I could get to that.”

A family packed their daughter’s room and moved. They’ll pay tribute to her in their new home

For years, the Muehlbergers were reluctant to move because they did not want to pack up Gracie’s room. Bryan Muehlberger turned down job offers in other states so the family could stay in their home.

“I walk by her room and I still see her,” her dad says in the film. “She liked to do somersaults off the bed. I can still hear (her) laughing loud.”

But after participating in the photo project and documentary film, the Muehlbergers finally packed up her things and moved to suburban Atlanta. They picked a few of Gracie’s items, like her dresser, for the new home and put others in storage.

Their new home is by a lake, and they plan to create an area called “Gracie’s Point,” with a firepit where family and friends can gather and make s’mores.

Hartman and Bopp gifted each of the families with picture books of their kids’ rooms, which played a big role in the Muehlbergers finally moving.

“This pushed us over the edge in a positive way. That got us both saying like, ‘We’re at peace now,’” Bryan Muehlberger said. “We have a big, coffee-table style picture book and now that there’s a film that’s going to be permanently out there, it’s helped us get over the hump.”

Gracie was the family entertainer – she’d hand invites to her parents to come to her room for dance and singing performances. In her room, an ornate chandelier with crystal droplets served as a dramatic backdrop.

The family that bought the Muehlbergers’ house in California plans to keep Gracie’s chandelier hanging in their son’s new room in her honour. A piece of Gracie’s light will continue to shine where she once lived.

Gracie had turned her room into a stage, illuminated by that chandelier. Her family believed she was destined to be a star.

So watching her now on Netflix feels unreal, her mom said.

“It’s just so crazy that she finally is on the big screen, but not in the way she would have ever dreamed to be,” Cindy Muehlberger said. “It just feels so surreal.”