(CNN)Greg Zanis, who spent more than 20 years building crosses and remembrances for mass shootings and other disasters, died Monday, his family said.
"Greg has passed onto his new life," read a message on a GoFundMe pagecreated by his daughter.
The 69-year-old Crosses for Losses founder was diagnosed late last year with bladder cancer. He was originally given a few years to live, but the cancer spread and his health crumbled, his family said.
"I'm very, very devastated with the whole thing. I can't stand the thought of doing nothing," the self-professed workaholic said during his final interview with CNN last month.
His friends and loved ones -- as well as those he touched in almost a quarter-century of delivering and erecting about 27,000 memorials created in his Aurora, Illinois, workshops -- wanted to see him one last time, so the family made it happen Friday.
With Illinois under stay-at-home orders amid the coronavirus pandemic, it wasn't safe for Zanis to accept visitors, so folks were invited to his Aurora home to say hello and goodbye from the yard. Wrapped in a red blanket and matching skull cap, Zanis greeted them from a wheelchair in the front door.
"You're our hero," read one sign held aloft by two mask-wearing supporters. The sign featured images of Zanis delivering his crosses to Dayton, Ohio, and other mass shooting sites.
Crosses for Losses[edit]
The first cross that Zanis (by this time, a resident of Aurora, Illinois) built was for his own father-in-law, a murder victim.[4][1] Shortly after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, Zanis constructed 15 crosses (including two for the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold) and delivered them to a park near the site of the shooting. The two crosses for Harris and Klebold were soon cut down by the father of one of the shooting victims.[5]
Since that time, Zanis built and delivered over 26,000 crosses, with some Stars of David and some crescents to sites of mass shootings and natural disasters across the United States including the 1 October shooting in Las Vegas (Harvest fest), Parkland, Tree of Life and many others. He founded an organization to raise funds for this effort, called Crosses for Losses. During that time, he kept handwritten notebooks of the names of the victims for whom he built memorials.[6]
dead at age 69
Spokane=81
he did this for victims of...
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