Greg Zanis, an Aurora man who gained national attention for placing crosses at the sites of mass shootings in the United States, died Monday after a battle with cancer.
A drive-by event to salute the ailing “Cross Man” was held outside his house Friday, and hundreds of people drove by to show their support. Zanis has mostly been bedridden recently and was on hospice care at his home.
“Mr. Greg Zanis was a giant among men,” Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin said in a statement Monday. “He was a man of action who simply wanted to honor the lives of others. In return, his life was one of honor and one that was celebrated throughout our nation and world. Heeding to the Scripture ‘pick up your cross and follow me,’ Mr. Greg Zanis did just that. He picked up the crosses he made and followed his mission in the noblest of ways. His legacy shall forever be remembered in his hometown of Aurora and around the globe.”
The Rev. Dan Haas, a longtime Auroran, knew Zanis since the beginning of his mission. In fact, it was the white cross Haas brought to a memorial for Zanis’ father-in-law after his murder that made the Aurora carpenter aware of the impact that a simple wooden memorial at a prayer vigil could have on a person struggling with grief.
Over the years, Haas accompanied Zanis on some of his delivery missions. For more than two years, the two men went into Chicago on a weekly basis to set up crosses for victims of violence in the city.
Haas remembers one episode when an activist was not all that happy with the men and their crosses, until Zanis walked over to him, gave him a big hug and said, “I love you, man.”
“That totally changed the whole atmosphere,” Haas said.
The first cross Zanis made was for Nicholas “Nico” Contreras, a 6-year-old boy shot and killed in his grandparents’ home in Aurora while sleeping in their back bedroom on Nov. 10, 1996.
Zanis entered the national spotlight when he erected crosses after the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999 in Colorado, where two students fatally shot 12 students and a teacher.
His mission led him to place crosses at the sites of tragedies around the country. Among his many trips, he placed crosses for the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, where a 20-year-old shot 20 children and six staff members.
He made the trip with his crosses to Las Vegas in October 2017, when a gunman opened fire on a crowd at a music festival, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds of others.
The impact of Zanis’ crosses was felt in other cities too.
In a 2019 interview with The Beacon-News, the then-mayor of Thousand Oaks, California, highlighted the role the crosses played after a gunman opened fire in a bar in his city in 2018 and killed 12 people.
Rob McCoy said Zanis’ crosses provided a single location for residents to gather and grieve following the shooting, which helped his community heal.
Tanna King, of Parkland, Florida, said Zanis’ crosses were a focal point for the community that helped them heal after 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.
“It’s where we went to grieve together, to reminisce, to be with other people who felt the same,” King said. “It was such a unifying place.”
King’s daughter was a junior at the high school at the time and lost several friends.
“It was so heartwarming that someone like Greg thought of other people,” King said. “I can’t imagine how difficult it was for him to do that time and time again and go to these places where people are in such pain.”
Zanis’ work hit home in 2019, when he built crosses in memory of the five people killed in the Henry Pratt warehouse shooting in Aurora.
Earlier this year, the crosses became the centerpiece of an Aurora Historical Society memorial exhibit focusing on the anniversary of the warehouse shooting.
John Jaros, the society’s director, said through the years, Zanis had begun working with local historical societies in the cities where he had brought crosses. He wanted to help make sure the memorials were preserved in some way.
Jaros said the mission to place the memorials took a toll on Zanis. He would make the crosses and drive hours on end, with no sleep, to get to whatever destination he was headed to and place the memorials, Jaros said.
“And it took a toll, mentally and physically, to share these families’ grief,” he said.
In all, Zanis made more than 27,000 crosses over the years as part of his Crosses for Losses ministry. In addition to crosses, he also built Jewish stars of David in honor of Jewish victims of gun violence, including the 11 people killed when a gunman opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
He’s also gone to the anniversaries of mass shootings, including Newtown and for the Northern Illinois University shooting in DeKalb that happened in February 2008.
It was Dec. 31, 2016, when hundreds of people carried more than 700 of his crosses in Chicago for each person slain in the city during the year.
Jaros described Zanis as “a human dynamo.”
“He wouldn’t stay still — he went and went and went,” Jaros said. “I guess he found his calling, his niche, and he ran with it.”
Beacon-News reporters Megan Jones and Sarah Freishtat, columnist Denise Crosby and freelance reporter Linda Girardi contributed.
MORE COVERAGE
Oct. 2017: Back from Las Vegas, Aurora’s Cross Man continues his mission
Dec. 2016: Aurora man builds crosses for everyone killed this year in Chicago
