After a mass shooting, should schools like Brown University demolish the site of violence?

Flowers left as a memorial outside the Barus and Holley building, site of the mass shooting on the Brown University campus.CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZIELLO/NYT

PROVIDENCE — When students return to Brown University later this month, they will not be able to access multiple sections of the academic building that have been sealed off since a gunman opened fire on a study session in December, killing two students and injuring nine.

Schools that experience deadly mass shootings face a wrenching decision over what to do about the scene of the violence, whether to preserve it as a memorial, renovate or alter it, or demolish it altogether and rebuild. It’s a decision, experts said, that reflects the pressures schools face about trauma and the need to resume some sense of normal life.

At Brown, two lecture halls, eight adjacent classrooms, and neighboring restrooms and hallways on the first floor, where the shooting took place, will remain closed for the time being, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, wrote in a message to the campus this week.

“It’s the right thing to seal those [rooms] off,” said Kevin LoGiudice, a Brown graduate student who worked in the building. “But it’s going to also be strange having a constant reminder of what happened behind those walls.”

Returning to the busy physics and engineering building, even with part of it closed, will be difficult for many students and staff, mental health specialists said.

“Some people are able to return to a location and resume their daily lives,” said Jillian Amodio, a licensed mental health professional in Maryland who has treated many people after shootings. “However, many people find that reentering the site of a traumatic event is not good for their mental health, and cutting off contact with that space is the best option for them.”

In some cases, communities have chosen to raze and rebuild buildings where shootings took place.

After 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, students began attending classes at a vacant middle school nearby. The original building was rebuilt and opened four years later.

After the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 19 children and two staff members, the school permanently closed and a new one, Legacy Elementary School, opened in October.

Other institutions have remained open while sealing off areas where violence took place.

After the Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., which killed 14 students and three employees in 2018, the school reopened two weeks later, except for Building 12. It remained boarded up and gated for years as the criminal case proceeded.

“It became this building that was frozen in time,” said Brittany Sinitch, a teacher at the school at the time.

Five years later, in 2023, Sinitch had the opportunity to return to her classroom before the building was demolished. Escorted inside by attorneys and police officers, she saw a room exactly as it had been left: chairs knocked over, a laptop still open, a Valentine’s Day card from a student killed in the shooting on her desk.

“I was just hysterical,” said Sinitch, who said revisiting the space was her way of finding closure. “It was like this out-of-body experience.”

A new high school building opened in August 2020.

Samantha Marxen, clinical director at Cliffside Recovery, an addiction treatment center in New Jersey, said it’s crucial for students and staff not to immediately return to the scene of the trauma “since the place can itself cause severe psychological disturbance.”

“Being in that setting can evoke intrusive memories, flashbacks, or heightened anxiety, which can impact one’s ability to concentrate, learn, or even feel safe,” Marxen said.

Others argue that reopening can send a message of resilience and defiance.

After the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, which killed 12 students and a teacher, the school reopened at the start of the next school year, except for the library where most of the violence unfolded. The library was replaced with a new one, the Hope Columbine Memorial Library.

Columbine teacher Jeff Garkow, also a graduate of the school, told History Colorado in a 2024 interview that razing the facility or changing its name wasn’t initially viewed as a popular option, since either one would feel like granting the assailants a victory. A memorial to the victims was ultimately built in nearby Clement Park.

Dr. Ron Acierno, professor and executive director of the UTHealth Houston Trauma and Resilience Center, said he “strongly disagrees” with knocking down any building that was the site of a shooting, or even sealing off the lecture halls at Barus and Holley at Brown.

“I don’t think that that’s consistent with reality to make something disappear. It’s not how we treat these types of problems,” said Acierno, who specializes in research surrounding victims of trauma, disaster, combat, or loss. “If you give that space up entirely, the perpetrator is the one who claims it.”

In Barus and Holley, hallways similar to the closed spaces will be updated with paint and carpet to change the look and feel, Paxson said in her message to students and staff.

Since the shooting, hundreds of bouquets have been left outside the building. Alongside them are messages on a white board that say “God bless the Brown community,” “Love will win,” and “When is enough, enough???”

A laminated piece of paper has a QR code that directs people to a YouTube video of Zach Bryan’s “Pink Skies,” a song about loss.

Just a few more final exams stood between students and winter break when the shooter burst into lecture hall 166 on Dec. 13 and started firing.

Bouquets left outside of Barus and Holley, the academic building at Brown University where a gunman killed two students in December.Steph Machado/Globe Staff

Longer-term decisions regarding the future of Barus and Holley, “including consideration of appropriate memorialization, will be made over time in consultation and conversation with the Brown community,” Brian Clark, a university spokesperson, said Thursday.

Unlike public spaces, college campuses are usually contained communities that are layered with daily routines and memories, said Emily Mellen, a clinical psychologist at Tufts Medical Center. When violence erupts in such a controlled environment, “it can pop what feels like a protective bubble,” on campus, making a memorial and acknowledgement of loss essential.

“What makes it a lot harder is if every time someone goes back, they feel like they’re the only one remembering, or like the school that has moved on and nobody cares,” Mellen said.