PARKLAND (AP) – Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to tour the blood-stained classroom building where the 2018 Parkland high school massacre happened, accompanied by some victims’ family members who are pushing for stricter gun laws and improved school safety.
Harris’ visit will be the latest by elected officials and law enforcement and education leaders in recent months to the boarded-up, three-storey building, which stands on the north side of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The tragic landmark has loomed over the school’s 3,600 students from behind temporary fencing since the February 14, 2018 shooting that left 14 students and three staff members dead and 17 wounded.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured the building in January and several members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have gone through since law enforcement returned custody of the building to the school district last summer.
When Harris goes inside, she will see bullet-pocked walls and floors still covered in dried blood and broken glass. Shoes left behind by fleeing students and wilted Valentine’s Day flowers and balloons are strewn about. Textbooks, laptop computers and papers remain on desks. Only personal items such as backpacks and purses have been removed.
“The building is a time capsule”, said Democratic United States (US) Jared Moskowitz, a Stoneman Douglas graduate who helped organise the visit.
Harris, he said, will “learn about the failures of the building, the failures of the response to the shooting by law enforcement, the failures in the training of the teachers, the failures of threat assessments of the shooter and the failure of all the warning signs”.
Some Stoneman Douglas families who participate in the tours, along with President Joe Biden, want the sale of ‘AR-15s’ and similar guns banned, as they were from 1994 to 2004, but there isn’t sufficient support in Congress.
