SHREVEPORT, La. — Seven hearses pulled up to the church under gray skies Saturday morning, and workers unloaded the eight caskets, two of them so small they could ride together.

It was a moment the battered city in northwest Louisiana had been girding itself for ever since the frantic morning last month when the despondent father of seven of the children methodically shot them in their bedrooms. The killings of so many children — the youngest just 3 and the oldest 11 — shocked the country and brought attention to the plight of the three mothers badly injured in the attack who survived only to face the agony of losing nearly every one of their children.