Illinois man who built memorials for mass shooting victims retires
From Parkland to Las Vegas, and Columbine to Sandy Hook, Greg Zanis’ work has been a comfort to those suffering in the aftermath of whichever mass shooting was the latest to lead the news cycle.
Zanis spent years creating almost 27,000 handcrafted memorials for every mass shooting victim, and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles at his own expense to lovingly place each one.
But now the carpenter has announced his retirement – emotionally exhausted by the heartbreak of his work amid the ongoing epidemic of mass shootings in America.
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Zanis, 69, was always among the first on the scene at any mass shooting across the United States, driving from his home in Aurora, Illinois, in his pickup truck and trailer to deliver and erect white crosses, Stars of David or Islamic crescent moons to memorialize each victim by name.
In the last few years alone there were 49 carvings pitched at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in June 2016, 58 in Las Vegas in October 2017 and 17 more at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in February 2018.
But it was a workplace shooting and the deaths of five people in his hometown of Aurora in February that forced Zanis to reflect and come to a decision to hand over his Crosses for Losses operation to Lutheran Church Charities (LCC).
“I can’t tell you how devastated I was, my own town,” Zanis told NBC Chicago. “I felt like I was carrying the weight of the country on my shoulders. I love what I’m doing but I’m getting called every day to go to 10 shootings. I just feel that 27,000 crosses later, it’s more demanding today than it was last year, and it was more demanding last year than the year before.
“These are people, not numbers. It’s not gay people in Orlando, it’s not Sikhs in Milwaukee, it’s not Jewish people in Pennsylvania, it’s not black people in Chicago. This is our country. We’re a family. We’re American first,” he said.
Zanis said it was this month’s shooting at a naval air station in Pensacola, Florida, in which three were killed, that finally made up his mind. “I got as far as Indianapolis and turned back,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “I decided I wasn’t going to do this any more.”
Zanis said he plans to visit to 135 Lutheran churches around the country to help teach volunteers how to construct the memorials, then spend time at home working on his 1927 Cadillac. He says he has amassed debt of $14,000 through constructing the crosses, each of which he says takes an hour to make, and has traveled an estimated 850,000 miles since 1996 to deliver them.
Zanis spoke to the Guardian in July 2012, after a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, claimed 12 lives, most in their teens or 20s.
“A cross is a prayer,” he said. “I think it’s so important. Nobody wants their child to be forgotten.”
In a statement, LCC said it was honored to continue his work. “We have accepted to further all the fine work that Greg has done,” the church said. “We have worked side by side with Greg at many of the shootings, from Sandy Hook to today.”
Relatives of some of those Zanis memorialized also paid tribute to his work on Twitter. “Thank you @gregzanis for bringing some peace to the families of gun violence victims,” wrote Abbie Guttenberg Youkilis, whose niece Jaime Guttenberg, 14, was among those killed in Parkland.
