NICKEL MINES, Pa. – The Amish school where a gunman shot 10 girls last week, killing five of them, is expected to be demolished Thursday, a fire department official said.
"Tomorrow morning the school is going to be torn down," Mike Hart, a spokesman for the Bart Fire Company, said late Wednesday.
Private contractors are scheduled to start demolishing the school before dawn and will haul the debris to a landfill, a process expected to take about four hours, Hart said. "There will be no burning," he said.
The West Nickel Mines Amish School has been boarded up since Oct. 2, when gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV stormed the one-room schoolhouse, releasing 15 boys and four adults before tying up and shooting the 10 girls. Roberts, who had come armed with a shotgun, rifle, handgun and a stun gun, then killed himself.
The five wounded girls are all still believed to be hospitalized. The hospitals are no longer providing any information about the patients at the request of their families. One of the hospitals, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, announced this week it would waive the children's huge medical bills.
Hart had said previously that classes were expected to resume this week at a makeshift schoolhouse in a garage on an Amish farm in the Nickel Mines area.
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