How other tragedy sites have been handled
Oct 4, 2013, 9:51 PM
(AP) – Following recent mass shootings, building owners have had to decide how the properties where the tragedies occurred should be reused, if at all. As officials plan changes to Washington Navy Yard Building 197, here is a look at what’s happened to some other mass shooting scenes:
-Voters in Newtown, Conn., will decide Saturday whether to approve plans to demolish the closed Sandy Hook Elementary School, were 26 people, including 20 children, were gunned down in December, and build a new school on the same property. Newtown students are being bused this school year to a renovated former middle school in neighboring Monroe.
-The Cinemark movie theater in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people died in a mass shooting in 2012, reopened in January with a new name _ Century Aurora instead of Century 16 _ and auditoriums identified by letters rather than numbers.
_The medical building at Fort Hood, Texas, where Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people in 2009 remains fenced off nearly four years later.
-At Virginia Tech, where student Seung-Hui Cho fatally shot 32 people before taking his own life in 2007, changes have been made to both buildings involved. Norris Hall, a classroom building where most of the victims died, now houses the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention in a second-floor wing no longer used for general instruction. The West Ambler Johnston dormitory where two people were killed reopened last school year after a complete makeover.
-West Nickel Mines Amish School in Nickel Mines, Pa., was demolished 10 days after a 2006 shooting that killed five girls. A replacement school, New Hope Amish School, was built a few hundred yards away.
-Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., was remodeled after 12 people, including the two gunmen, were killed April 20, 1999. The library where they died was demolished and rebuilt in a different area.
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