COMMUNITIES BEAR WITH SITES OF MASS SHOOTINGS

by MGM Resorts International, which will have to decide what to do with them.

Barbara Poma, the owner of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., where 49 people died in a shooting in June 2016, said the decision will not be easy. “There are so many feelings and emotions involved, and those feelings change over time,” Poma said. “No rash decision should be made at all.” She said she is still in discussions over what to do with Pulse.

There are no events scheduled at Las Vegas Village, and the gunman’s hotel rooms at the Mandalay Bay remain sealed off as a crime scene (though other rooms on the 32nd floor are in use).

Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said Monday that investigators were still working at both sites. He said the police continued to seek information about Paddock’s motive and had visited the gunman’s property again in hopes of uncovering new information.

“This individual purposely hid his actions leading up to this event,” Lombardo said. “And it is difficult for us to find the answers to those actions.”

People who have been through the process of dealing with shooting sites after the police are done with them know that difficult and delicate discussions will loom for MGM and for everyone with a deep interest in what happened and what happens next.

“Where the victims were, that is relatively easy to deal with, in that what happened there was a tragedy, with independent acts of heroism and solidarity,” said James Hawdon, a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech. “It would be easy to transform, because there is nothing there. It’s basically a vacant lot.”

Trickier, he said, will be the gunman’s perch in the hotel — a spacious suite with wraparound views and an adjoining standard room, where Paddock shot through an entry door at a security officer and was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

“The hotel rooms, it’s hard to think of anything socially positive from the space,” Hawdon said. “That space was purely evil, the actions in that space. To me, you somehow try to make it unrecognizable. You want to try to make it devoid of meaning related to the tragedy.”

Hawdon’s office at Virginia Tech is in Norris Hall, the building where 30 of the 32 victims of a 2007 mass shooting were killed in two second-floor classrooms and a hallway. After much discussion, Virginia Tech decided to remodel the space into laboratories and offices, including Hawdon’s.

“People have asked me, ‘Does that bother you?’” Hawdon said. “I say no, because what that space represents is resilience — not the violence, but the response that followed the violence.”

The conundrum of what to do with a mass murder scene has been felt acutely in Orlando.

“When Pulse first happened, I remember telling myself, ‘Tear it down, tear it down, tear it down,’” said Poma, who owns both the 4,000-square-foot nightclub building and the land where it stands. “I wanted it, I needed it, gone — it was so awful, I wanted it to go away. And now, 16 months later, people settled down, and some people are like, ‘No, it’s part of our history. You shouldn’t take it down.’”

She has no interest in reopening the nightclub, the way the Bataclan concert hall in Paris did a year after 90 people were shot and killed there in 2015.

The city of Orlando offered to buy the Pulse property, but Poma decided instead to form the nonprofit Onepulse Foundation, whose main mission is to erect a memorial and museum there. The foundation has sought input from survivors, the families of victims, the police and emergency workers, and the general public on questions like whether to demolish the building.

“It’s part of our history — not just Orlando’s history, but American history,” Poma said. “Those tragedies cannot be erased, and their lives should not be erased. They were taken, and you can’t let that happen in vain.”

Her advice to MGM is to take time to assess what to do. But at some point, the company will have some difficult decisions to make.

Should it simply close off the gunman’s rooms indefinitely? Should it remodel them? Should it renumber the rooms, or even the floor, to disguise the place’s sordid history?

As for the 15-acre lot across the street, the company must decide whether it can ever be used again as an open-air venue. And over the longer term, it must decide whether a memorial, a museum or something else should be erected.

Or, this being Las Vegas, the land could be developed, leaving no visible trace of what had been there before.

No matter what is decided, though — no matter how much the landscape and the scene may be altered — what happened there will not be erased.