The Pennsylvania schoolhouse where 10 Amish girls were gunned down last week has been razed to the ground as the community tries to heal from the tragedy.
Crews with backhoes and bulldozers moved in Thursday just before dawn to demolish the Nickel Mines school house where Charles Carl Roberts barged in and shot the girls execution-style last Monday, killing five of them and turning the gun on himself.Only heaps of rubble hint at what used to stand on the site, which is expected to be seeded and left as pasture.
"The object was to get the school down and loaded and out of here very quickly," said Mike Hart, spokesman for the local Bart Township Fire Company that oversaw the demolition.
"This was a day of closure, but there will never be closure in our hearts," he added. "Every time we drive by that location, our heart will always be there."
As the sun began to rise, backhoes were breaking concrete and bulldozers pushed the remains of the building into piles. The debris was hauled by truck to a landfill, Reuters reports.
"This community is so ready to try to get back to as near normal as possible," said Sam Fisher, the Amish manager of a local auction house that became the de facto headquarters for media crews in the township to cover the story.
Fisher said his sons showed up at 4 a.m. to help remove the school's fencing for the demolition crew.
Lessons have also resumed for the surviving schoolchildren at an undisclosed location, he said. Fisher added, however, that there's now a wrenching imbalance between the sexes, since all the boys were allowed to leave, and just one girl escaped, before the shooting started. Five girls remain hospitalised.
"They have one girl. All those boys and one girl," he said.
At a makeshift memorial on a nearby street corner, mourners have left bouquets of flowers for the victims. One note attached to a soft plush toy read: "You are in our prayers. We are so sorrowed. Visitors from Florida."
Another said, "God's Little Angels. In our hearts forever."
The community of Nickel Mines touched hearts with their outpouring of forgiveness in the wake of the killings, and Fisher repeated this appeal for forgiveness for the gunman.
He also criticised as senseless an attack on his grave, where dirt was strewn around and flowers were kicked over.
He said Roberts may not have been ultimately responsible for his crime. "The devil took control of him," Fisher said. "I would hope that that's the way that people feel."
