Parkland Families, Students Watch As Demolition Begins At School Shooting Site

Demolition efforts began Friday at the site of the three-story classroom building in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were fatally shot on Valentine’s Day 2018.

The demolition at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which had been postponed from Thursday due to rain and flooding, started with pieces of the structure’s top floor being pulled away by machinery. Family members of the victims were invited to watch, with school faculty, students and elected officials also in attendance.

“This is the end to the story, the period at the end of it,” Dylan Persaud, a former student who was at the school on the day of the shooting, told the Miami Herald while watching the demolition. “But you can never forget something like this.”

Officials have not yet said what will replace the building, whose demolition is expected to continue over the coming weeks while students are out for summer break.

The building had been preserved as evidence in the shooter’s trial and has since sat closed off and boarded up, still riddled with bullet holes. It was only recently that long-abandoned objects, like textbooks, laptops, deflated Valentine’s Day balloons and wilted flowers, were cleared out ahead of the demolition, The Associated Press reported.

Victims’ families, school and law enforcement officials, and politicians, including Vice President Kamala Harris, had all toured the building amid efforts to strengthen gun laws and school safety.

“It’s important for that building to be taken down, so not only can I start to heal but also the community at large,” Lori Alhadeff — whose 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was killed in the shooting and who now chairs the Broward County School Board — told The New York Times.

Aisha Hashmi, who graduated this month, was in sixth grade when the shooting happened. But she said her older siblings were on campus when the shooting happened, and students would still have to pass by the empty building in the years after.

“Whenever I would walk past it, it was just kind of eerie,” she told The Associated Press.

A fence surrounding the building helped block it from view, but students could peer into its windows when the wind blew back the fence’s screening, she said.

“It is heartbreaking to see and then have to go sit in your English class,” said Hashmi.