Fate of building where most were killed unknown

Law enforcement officers assemble outside Norris Hall on April 16. The university has made no plans beyond cleaning and repairing the building.

? Like the people of New York, Oklahoma City and Littleton, Colo., the Virginia Tech community faces a difficult decision on what it will do with the scene of a tragedy.

The classrooms and hallways of the school’s Norris Hall were littered with the bodies of 25 students and five professors on April 16, plus the body of gunman Seung-Hui Cho.

Two other students were slain in a campus dormitory.

The university has made no plans beyond cleaning and repairing the flat-roofed, oblong stone structure, which has remained under police guard since the killing spree.

However, faculty, students and alumni have already weighed in with suggestions for Norris’ future, one of more than 100 buildings on Virginia Tech’s 2,600-acre campus. Built in the early 1960s, it houses the department of engineering science and mechanics.

Ideas for the building’s future range from returning it to use as classrooms to making it a memorial or even knocking it down.

The decision on Norris Hall’s fate is ultimately up to Virginia Tech President Charles Steger, said university spokesman Mark Owczarski.