​A year after carnage, Newtown begins razing school

Behind a black fence that blocks the view from outside, the school in Newtown, where 20 first graders and six employees were killed by a 20-year-old gunman in December, is being razed.

Robert Mitchell, the chairman of the town's public building and site commission, said on Friday that demolition of one section of the school, Sandy Hook Elementary, began on Thursday and continued on Friday.

Photographs and video footage from news helicopters that flew overhead showed backhoes ripping off the roof.

Mitchell said no one had been shot in the section that was torn down this week. Adam Lanza, the gunman who opened fire at the school on December 14, wearing combat gear, had already killed his mother at home before he went to the school.

The demolition will continue section by section, for the next weeks, Mitchell said, and is to be completed by the first anniversary of the shootings. He said that demolition workers prepared other parts of the single-storey building to come down as they levelled the first section. Officials had declared the school off-limits to everyone except the contractors hired to demolish it. Mitchell said the workers had been directed to destroy anything that could be identified with the school to protect the victims' privacy and to prevent pieces from being sold online.

The town voted on October 5 to accept nearly $50 million in state money for a new school to be built on the same site.