New Doc Captures the Untouched Bedrooms of School Shooting Victims

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Steve Hartman, Bryan Muehlberger, thank you both for joining us. Steve, let me start with you. You have been working on this project for seven years on the side of your day job, and I guess, you have been to so many of these school shootings, the stories the week after. Why do this project?

 

STEVE HARTMAN: The project was born out of a kind of frustration that I felt the country was growing numb to the school shooting epidemic. And I was growing numb, you know, and if I’m, to be really honest, you know, I guess I could say that I just didn’t care as much as I once did. There’d be a school shooting and it would make news for a little while and everybody was moving on and I didn’t like seeing that in myself and I didn’t like seeing it in the country. So I started thinking, what could I do to possibly shake people out of that numbness and that this project was born from that feeling.

 

SREENIVASAN: I don’t know if you felt this as a reporter, but I remember being in the living rooms after the Newtown tragedy of the parents, and it was so devastating and I thought for sure that was gonna be it. That’s the end. There couldn’t be anything more tragic than all these children that were gunned down, okay, we’re gonna have legislation, we’re gonna stop this. But as the statistics in your film point out, it hasn’t stopped.

 

HARTMAN: No.  I don’t think I ever really thought that. I know that that was kind of the mood in the country for maybe a few months afterwards, but, you know, the whole debate, the gun debate and all the arguments, you know, they haven’t led us anywhere. I mean, I think Sandy Hook is proof of that, and the statistics are proof of that. And I’m hoping that this film can serve as kind of a new beginning, a fresh start. You know, if we just, because we can’t begin to solve the problem – I don’t think – until we fully feel the weight of it. And this film definitely lets people feel the weight of it. And I hope people watch it with an open mind and they don’t have to worry about being lectured about what, you know, guns or whatever the solution is, is just let’s, let’s start back at the beginning and let’s care again. Let’s restore our empathy.

 

SREENIVASAN: Bryan, your daughter Gracie, was killed at the Saugus High School shooting back in November of 2019, and you are one of the parents that share their stories and allowed Steve to just literally be in her room. Tell us, I guess, our audience a little bit about Gracie.

 

BRYAN MUEHLBERGER: Yeah, Gracie was our, our youngest daughter. So we had two boys and then Gracie. She was a vivacious, funny, just life the party type of little girl. I mean, ever since she was little, she had a camera phone in her hand or a camera of some sort, always filming herself and entertaining. And as she, as she got older she continued doing that and she just lived life to its fullest

 

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She was the life of the party. She brought a lot of joy to us. I feel like she was a gift from God telling us what true joy looked like, and, and that’s what she represented for us.

 

SREENIVASAN: I guess one of the first things that people will wonder is why did you keep her room the same way?

 

MUEHLBERGER: You know, it was, it was the first place we went to when we got home from the hospital that morning. And it was a place we spent a lot of time in the days and weeks after. It started symbolizing, you know, the life that was in so many ways. It was a place where we went to feel Gracie’s presence in so many ways. It had, you know, her personality, you know, peppered throughout the entire place. You know, as the years went on, we cleaned it up and straightened it up and things like that. It was, it was quite a disaster the day of, like any teenager room might be. You know, clothes drawn everywhere, you know, all the 17 outfits she might have tried on that week planning for her weekend and so forth.

But it was, it was a place of peace, a place of solace where we could go and, and just feel her presence and be with her, you know, for so many – up until we, we recently moved, my wife every morning would, would open her door, Gracie’s door and say, good morning, sweet pea. And every night, you know, tell her goodnight and close the door, as if she was still there in so many ways. So it was just a welcome opportunity to have Steve and them experience some of that with us.

 

SREENIVASAN: Steve, you’ve now had the opportunity to stand in these places. For someone who might not have ever done that, give us a sense of what that’s like, what kind of emotions hit you.

 

HARTMAN: Well, the rooms many times, just they’re frozen in time and there’re little details, there’re little details that stand, stand out, that show just how quickly that life was extinguished. A lot of tasks left undone, like the toothpaste tube with the cap still off. You know, homework strewn on the floor, I’ll pick that up later, I’ll do that later. And later never came. So for me, you know, standing in the rooms just reminds me of how quickly the life was taken. And also allows, for some reason, I see my own kids in all these rooms because, you know, there’s, they’re kind of, there’s a sameness to them in that, like, sometimes the same little trinkets that they collect are in, in my kids’ rooms. And I think what sets the film apart is that you know, you show the picture of a beautiful child that was killed in a school shooting, and you can easily dismiss, oh, that’s somebody else’s child. That’s not me. But you look around the room and I feel like it becomes your kid’s room. And I think that maybe that’s part of the reason that the film is resonating as deeply as it is, is because we finally have a chance to put ourselves in those shoes.

 

SREENIVASAN: Bryan, you know, being kind of in this weird place where the spotlight is on you for, maybe it’s a day or a week, and then you have Steve Hartman kind of reaching out in this sort of very long-term project and asking you. What made you wanna say yes?

 

MUEHLBERGER: You know, it was – we were a little apprehensive at first. We received his letter in April of ‘24, and, and Cindy and I talked about it at length. We had, we had a desire in our hearts to move outta California. We’ve been wanting to move for a while since the shooting, and we couldn’t come to peace and come to grips with things. And we’d often thought, like, how would we, how would we go about this? Would we film the room ourselves, get a professional photographer, you know, recreate it where we land next, and things like that? And, and it, and it was, you know, kind of a blessing from God, as my wife always says to Steve, like, you’re, you’re an angel from heaven and coming into our life and giving us this opportunity to film her room and to get really intimate with it so that people can experience that sacred space, really gave us a sense of peace. And so when they came in in June and started filming, we just felt this, this complete peace come over us that we just felt like this was meant to be, you know, that we were supposed to share Gracie’s room with the world and Gracie’s personality.

 

HARTMAN: If nothing else comes from this, Bryan, you know, we’ve, we’ve all invested a lot of time and effort into this film, and if nothing else comes from it, then you guys being able to, you know, move and set the, set the room aside, good by me.

 

MUEHLBERGER: Yeah. Yeah, it definitely made us feel that you know, I, I think I asked the, you know, the question in the, in the documentary, you know, if the room goes away, does she go away? And, and we can honestly say that’s, that’s not the case. She does not go away when that room goes away. She’s still alive and well in our hearts, in the film. You get to see her personality and, you know, we, we still experience her every single day of our lives. 

 

SREENIVASAN: Bryan, Steve comes with a photographer, Lou Bopp, and they take photos and really almost intimate portraits of things that are in Gracie’s room. Tell us, if you can, what are some of the things that were maybe revealed in these photos that you’ve been walking by but noticed in a different way?

 

MUEHLBERGER: Yeah, I mean, for one thing, you know, I’d never seen such a responsible and respectful individual as I saw in Lou, you know, walking into these rooms, you know, I didn’t catch it until the movie came out and we saw the premiere of it. And, you know, he would take his shoes off before we would go in there just to honor the sacred place of the rooms. And, you know, he got in there and, you know, we showed him around a little bit, but then we, we left him to be. And he just sat there and looked at the room in different angles and views and got on his belly and looked under the bed and under things and, and took, took light of things that you probably don’t capture, you know, as much when you’re just walking by it day in and day out. Because the way, you know, he just photographs things. He’s just amazing. 

I would say, you know, when, you know, we got Gracie’s shoes back that she was wearing the day of the shooting, and they sit on the stand where her clothes and outfits were, were still hung up for the red remainder that week. She had two outfits still picked out for Friday that week. And the shoes are on there, and he takes a picture of the shoes at such an angle that I, I, I can see moments of that day in a, in a very surreal way that I never noticed before. And that just, that’s just because he’s, you know, he’s so up and close with the photo.

 

SREENIVASAN: Yeah.

 

MUEHLBERGER: He, he captured the personality of Gracie throughout definitely, you know, the, the trinkets she had in her drawer, and the notes she had to her future self, and the pillows on the bed and her, her big stuffed dog that she had there and things like that.

 

HARTMAN: And capturing that personality for me, and I think the families too, was really fun. I mean, it seems strange to say that you’re going into this place that seems so bitterly sad, but there were, there were laughs, you know? Yeah. I think anybody loses a child if under any circumstance they want the world to remember their child. And there’s usually a lot of laughs that go along with that. So we, we actually had a good time and it was just fun to learn about the kids and, and share their stories and just doing our part to make sure these kids are not forgotten.

 

SREENIVASAN: Steve, when you did this project, I mean, this was not blessed by CBS news. You say in the documentary that you really kind of kept it hidden from your bosses until it was pretty much done. Why?

 

HARTMAN: Because, you know, I’m the feel-good news guy, you know, I do the stories that come at the end of the newscast that are meant to restore your faith in humanity. So this project was way off brand for me. It was one of those better to ask forgiveness than permission kind of things.

 

SREENIVASAN: There seems to be also, as you kind of point out, a tension in how you approach the job, the assignments that you were given to try to find that silver lining after a horrible week at the end of a mass shooting, and you just saying, I don’t wanna do this anymore.

 

HARTMAN: Yeah. For a while, anytime there was any mass shooting – because I was always, my stories can come at the end of the CBS evening news and, you know, we wanna leave people on a positive note. So I was told to find some positive angle to this school shooting, as crazy as that sounds. And there are things, there are the hero teacher or the community coming together, but just with this subject, I just didn’t wanna do it anymore. You know, I wasn’t, I didn’t wanna do anymore sort of feel good stories about, you know, a school shooting. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had to go in a different direction.

 

SREENIVASAN: Bryan, one of the things that you share with Steve is a box where you discovered that she sent, wrote notes to her future self. And what do those notes mean to you now?

 

MUEHLBERGER: You know, they were an interesting find to say the least when we first found them originally. And, you know, they’re, they’re kind of surreal because she’s writing letters to her future self. And she wrote one, you know, graduating eighth grade, starting high school, driving, and going off to college. She was able to accomplish two of them. So when you read the ones that she didn’t get to accomplish, you’re a bit sad that she didn’t get to enjoy those experiences in life. But at the same time, you saw that she had the wherewithal to even think about writing to her future self. And in a sense, she’s almost writing to us. 

There’s an interesting component to that. She said to herself, she wrote a poem and I’ve got it tattooed on my arm now: “You only have one life to live, so why not live it great, real and fill it with memories and experiences?” And that accompanied those letters that she wrote to her future self. And it just kind of gave us a sense of, she’s telling us like how we need to embrace life and, and live going forward. And I think that was the takeaway we got from that for sure.

 

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that’s fascinating is the ripple effects of how this sadness not just deals with the, for the parents, but also the siblings. What has it been like tolerating, bearing this grief while you still have to be a dad to kids who are also grieving, but kids who are trying to process this and they need their mom and dad full-time as well?

 

MUEHLBERGER: Yeah, it was I mean, it was something, you know, when I, I’m working on writing a book right now and I’ve kind of been reflecting on the day of the shooting and, and the days after. I was talking to Heather, who was sitting next to my side, friend of my wife’s. And she was recalling, she goes, you immediately went from, you know, down on your hands and knees crying to father mode. You know, you’ve got, you gotta now contact your boys. You gotta start calling the family members and, and take action.

So I think we’re just innately wired to do that. And I think that’s what keeps me going. You know, I’m sure this is hard on many families when they go through a tragedy like this and losing a child, but I immediately just thought to myself, I’ve got these two other boys I’ve gotta take care of. I’ve got a wife who I need to be there for. And it’s something that we do every day, you know, I mean, I’m, we’re always reaching out to our boys. We’re spread across the country now and, you know, they’re doing well, but they’re still dealing with it as well, just like we are.

 

SREENIVASAN: Steve, you were able to capture a couple of the siblings as well, and you could see on camera how deeply affected the siblings are by this.

 

HARTMAN: Yeah, the filmmaker Josh Seftel, he interviewed the boys of one of the families. And you know, I was in the other room when he was doing that interview. And it’s, it was hard. It’s hard to listen to because, you know, I don’t know, you hear, you hear often from the grieving parents, but it’s not often that you hear what this whole experience is like for the siblings. And again, I just, I’m just wired to sort of put myself in those shoes and, and think about, you know, my other kids and how they, how devastated they would be. So yeah, that’s a – the film is full of, you know, there’s, it’s emotional and that’s one of the more emotional moments in the film. But the film also, you know, there’s laughs you know, there’s, there’s giggles at things that – and I think ultimately, you know, through it all, you know, I feel great hope at the end of this film. I feel like that we can, we can find a better way. And I just feel like maybe this might just be the beginning and I certainly hope it is.

 

SREENIVASAN: Bryan, Steve and Lou gave you and all the families a book of photos. What did that book mean?

 

MUEHLBERGER: You know, it was that, it was that invitation that it’s, it’s okay to move, is what it was. You know, we’ve got that, that takeaway now of her room that, I mean, with, with amazing photography as you’ve seen in the film that you know, we can look at anytime we want and come back to that room. So that gave us that invitation to move away. 

And, and I wanted to add one thing, when they had reached out about doing this film, Steve and I had a conversation because I get contacted a lot, and a lot of these things have to do with the polarizing and political side of gun violence or what have you. And that we talked about two things in particular. One is we didn’t want it to be one side or the other. This is a human issue we’ve got, especially in our country. And the second side was we really wanted to draw that empathy out in the viewer. We wanted them to step into the rooms, as Steve says, and, and feel some of that pain that we experience every single day of our lives. But the hope that this maybe inspire some change in some positive way.

 

SREENIVASAN: The film is called “All The Empty Rooms.” It’s available now on Netflix. Bryan Muehlberger, Steve Hartman, thank you both for joining us.

 

MUEHLBERGER: Thank you

HARTMAN: Thanks for having us.