Almost a Year After Massacre, Newtown Begins Razing Sandy Hook School

Religion Today | Updated: Oct 28, 2013

Almost a Year After Massacre, Newtown Begins Razing Sandy Hook School

Behind a black fence that blocks the view from outside, the school in Newtown, Conn., where 20 first graders and six employees were killed by a 20-year-old gunman in December, is being razed, the New York Times reports. Robert Mitchell, chairman of the town's public building and site commission, said Friday that demolition of one section of Sandy Hook Elementary began on Thursday and continued on Friday. Mitchell said no one had been shot in the section that was torn down last week. The demolition will continue, piece by piece and section by section, for the next several weeks, and is to be completed by the first anniversary of the shootings, Mitchell said. He said demolition workers prepared other parts of the single-story building to come down as they leveled the first section. Officials had declared the school off-limits to everyone except the contractors hired to demolish it. Mitchell said the workers had been directed to destroy anything that could be identified with the school -- in part to protect the victims' privacy, in part to prevent pieces of the school from being sold online. The bricks will be crushed beyond recognition, he said, and the contractors were required to sign confidentiality agreements intended to keep descriptions of the inside of the school from circulating on the Internet. The town voted on Oct. 5 to accept nearly $50 million in state money for a new school to be built on the same site. The vote came five months after a task force recommended demolishing the old building. More than 400 students are attending classes in a school building in nearby Monroe, Conn., that had been empty. Mitchell said architects were drawing plans for the new school in Newtown, which is expected to be completed in time for the 2016-2017 school year.

Almost a Year After Massacre, Newtown Begins Razing Sandy Hook School