Newtown house of Sandy Hook school killer Adam Lanza demolished

Reporting from New York —  Demolition workers have torn down the Newtown, Conn., home where gunman Adam Lanza planned the school massacre that killed 26 people, including 20 children, two years ago, part of a town effort to recover by erasing all traces of the killer.

Destruction of the large, colonial-style home in a bucolic neighborhood of Newtown follows the razing of the Sandy Hook Elementary School, which was targeted on the morning of Dec. 14, 2012.

In addition to gunning down 20 first-graders and six school employees, Lanza, 20, shot his mother, Nancy, to death in the home they shared. He killed himself in the school hallway as police responded to the shooting.

For months, officials debated what to do about the Sandy Hook school and considered a variety of options, including a major renovation, building a new school at another site, or tearing down the existing facility and rebuilding on the same spot.

Eventually, residents voted in favor of using money from a state grant to tear down the school and build a new one on the spot. A task force created in the wake of the shooting also voted to tear down the school and rebuild, a process underway and scheduled to be completed in 2016.

What to do with the Lanza home did not draw the same debate as the school plan, which some parents opposed on grounds that demolishing the facility would further disrupt the lives of schoolchildren. Town officials, relatives of Sandy Hook victims and neighbors living near the shooter’s home agreed that the house should go, and a demolition firm offered to do the job for free.

On Monday, demolition workers arrived at the house, in a hilly, residential neighborhood of Newtown a few miles from the Sandy Hook school site, and began tearing it down. By late morning, according to the Newtown Bee, the house was gone. Workers wrapped up the job Tuesday, and photographs taken by local media showed a vast, vacant lot where the pale yellow house with the long driveway had once been.

The contents of the home had been incinerated earlier by officials who wanted to prevent anyone from collecting them either for ghoulish reasons or to sell to other people.

Adam Lanza and his mother had lived in the 3,100-square-foot house since 1998. It fell into the hands of relatives after their deaths. A bank acquired the property and donated it to the town in December.

“All I want to say is I am glad it is done,” Mary Ann Jacob, Newtown’s legislative council chairman, said after the demolition, the News-Times of Connecticut reported.

There are no plans to build anything new on the site.

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