The home where mass killer Adam Lanza plotted the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School will be demolished, CNN reported Thursday.
The Newtown, Conn., city council voted unanimously on Wednesday to tear down the half-million-dollar colonial house, according to CNN.
While the demolition has not been scheduled, Mary Ann Jacob, chairman for the Newtown Legislative Council, told the news network that it will occur “as soon as is practical.”
The city’s top elected official, Patricia Llodra, told Reuters that she expects the house to come down by the spring.
Lanza shot his sleeping mother at the home before heading to the elementary school, where he killed 26 students and educators in one of the worst school shootings in American history.
Seems a bit wasteful. Will they be turning it into a park for children or something that makes sense or just spitefully leaving it undeveloped and economically useless?
Doesn’t make much sense to me, either. I’ve never quite understood the notion that because something bad happened in a house, the house is somehow altered because of it. The house isn’t guilty of anything.
(I have much the same reaction to the notion of hallowed ground - “It was on this very spot that X did Y, so we should put a fence around it. People will come from miles around to gaze upon it.” It’s just dirt.)
I’m assuming that Newton owns the home?
Yes, Newtown owns it. It had a whopping mortgage on it when the owner was killed (about $400k). The bank acquired it, and then decided to donate it to the town, probably realizing that its market value was severely depressed because of superstitious buyers. If they had to continue to maintain it for months or years while trying to sell it, it would have been a loser.
I wonder how the town get title to it? I’d guess unpaid taxes.
On one hand, it does seem stupid and pointless, but, on the other, it has to be dragging down property values for the entire neighborhood.
And even if you were one of those people who are so free of superstition that you’d ordinarily gleefully take advantage of the opportunity to buy a house where a non-notorious murder took place at a huge markdown, you’d still have to think twice about this one when you consider the likelihood you’d take a loss on it if you ever sold it, even as the tax value kept pace with the the homes in a neighborhood where the first murder in the most atrocious spree killing in American history took place.
Right now, its just a magnet for Goth teens with candles and Ouija boards, crazy people and haunted attraction speculators.