Demolition efforts started Friday on the website of the three-story classroom constructing in Parkland, Florida, the place 17 folks had been fatally shot on Valentine’s Day 2018.
The demolition at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive Faculty, which had been postponed from Thursday as a result of rain and flooding, began with items of the construction’s high ground being pulled away by equipment. Relations of the victims had been invited to look at, with college school, college students and elected officers additionally in attendance.
“That is the top to the story, the interval on the finish of it,” Dylan Persaud, a former scholar who was on the college on the day of the taking pictures, instructed the Miami Herald whereas watching the demolition. “However you possibly can always remember one thing like this.”

South Florida Solar-Sentinel by way of Getty Photographs
Officers haven’t but stated what is going to substitute the constructing, whose demolition is anticipated to proceed over the approaching weeks whereas college students are out for summer time break.
The constructing had been preserved as proof within the shooter’s trial and has since sat closed off and boarded up, nonetheless riddled with bullet holes. It was solely just lately that long-abandoned objects, like textbooks, laptops, deflated Valentine’s Day balloons and wilted flowers, had been cleared out forward of the demolition, The Related Press reported.
Victims’ households, college and regulation enforcement officers, and politicians, together with Vice President Kamala Harris, had all toured the constructing amid efforts to strengthen gun legal guidelines and college security.

DREW ANGERER by way of Getty Photographs
“It’s vital for that constructing to be taken down, so not solely can I begin to heal but additionally the neighborhood at massive,” Lori Alhadeff — whose 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was killed within the taking pictures and who now chairs the Broward County Faculty Board — instructed The New York Instances.
Aisha Hashmi, who graduated this month, was in sixth grade when the taking pictures occurred. However she stated her older siblings had been on campus when the taking pictures occurred, and college students would nonetheless should cross by the empty constructing within the years after.
“At any time when I might stroll previous it, it was simply type of eerie,” she instructed The Related Press.
A fence surrounding the constructing helped block it from view, however college students might peer into its home windows when the wind blew again the fence’s screening, she stated.
“It’s heartbreaking to see after which should go sit in your English class,” stated Hashmi.