Brett Lemon | Special to The Roanoke Times

Investigator C.R. Dillon gives a tour Sunday of the new Roanoke Police Academy, which includes a number of specialized training classrooms.

The new Roanoke Police Academy is on Barns Avenue.

When Lt. Roscoe Musselwhite began teaching Roanoke Police Academy classes in 1969, all he had was a room in the old WDBJ building on Kirk Avenue in downtown Roanoke.

A federal grant allowed him to buy tables, chairs and one TV.

"We had a good police academy, just our space was cramped," Musselwhite, who retired in 1976, said Sunday as he stood in the new Roanoke Police Academy building on Barns Avenue. "It wasn't anything like this."

Musselwhite said the academy he started out with could fit in one room of the 28,000-square-foot, $7.2 million facility, where an open house was held Sunday afternoon.

The event was attended mostly by retirees of the department and their families. About 80 people gathered in the gym for a presentation, during which Chief Joe Gaskins presented the department's Medal of Valor to Roanoke police Officers Bryan Lawrence and N.D. Comas.

Lawrence was left partially paralyzed after he was attacked while making an arrest in 2008.

Comas saved a woman who tried to jump off a bridge into the path of a train last month.

Officers also guided visitors on tours of the building, including offices, an aquatic training center and a weight room. As he led a tour, investigator C.R. Dillon said all the lights in the building, including in the bathrooms, are activated by motion detectors.

"Makes you feel like you've got some kind of superpower," he said.

Lt. Rick Morrison, the academy's director, said the academy began moving into the building last month. It will be used not only to train Roanoke officers but to host in-service training for other law enforcement agencies and seminars for businesses "to help us become more self-sufficient and generate cash flow."

It will also benefit other agencies, where tight budgets have made it difficult to find training opportunities, he said.

One room that stands nearly empty will soon house a firearms simulator and a driving simulator, Dillon said. The polygraph room is soundproof to prevent interference from firearms training down the hall.

The firearms training room was Callie and Cameron Clary's favorite room in the building.

"It's cool how they do that," said 9-year-old Cameron, whose dad, retired Roanoke police Detective Alexander "Smitty" Clary, now teaches criminal justice at ITT Technical Institute.

"It was amazing," said Callie Clary, 14. "All the technology they have and all the things they can do here in the building."

Musselwhite said that after he taught academy classes at the WDBJ building, he taught them at the city water department and the Grand Piano and Furniture Co. building. Classes were most recently taught in a rented space at Jefferson Center.

"We were very happy with what we had, considering we had nothing to start with," he said. "But this, this is amazing."