The six-bedroom house was demolished early Thursday morning.
The house where four University of Idaho students were murdered has been torn down.
Demolition of the six-bedroom house began as dawn broke over the college campus, which had emptied out due to the winter holiday break. Cable news channels captured the destruction live.
NewsNation’s Nancy Loo was at the scene.
“Sanitation crews are being followed by law enforcement. Law enforcement will actually guard the debris. They didn’t say for how long, but, yes, they are concerned about morbid souvenir hunters,” Loo says.
Students Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death in November 2022 in a case that shocked the country. Twenty-eight-year-old defendant criminology PhD student Bryan Kohberger has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
The house cost the university $700 a day for round-the-clock security guards. The university says demolishing the house is the first step in the community’s healing from the trauma.
However, the demolition has divided the victims’ families. Ethan Chapin’s family supports it, but Kaylee Goncalves and Xana Kernodle’s loved ones expressed strong opposition.
“They’re pretty upset. I mean, it's one of those things when you don’t really think it's gonna happen until it happens. And so watching the demo on the television was pretty hard for the victims’ families,” Shannon Gray, the Goncalves family attorney, says.
After 90 minutes, the house was gone, but the horror of what happened there remains.
The University says they plan on building what they call a healing garden where the house once stood.
