Pfleger planning Michigan Avenue anti-violence rally on Saturday

A Chicago demonstration honoring the hundreds of people who were killed in 2016 is planned for the last day of year.

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Chicago priest, says crosses will be carried on Saturday for each of more than 760 people killed in Chicago. The demonstration starts at 11 a.m. on the upscale shopping district along Michigan Avenue.

“Each person will carry a two-foot-tall, white wooden cross bearing the name of each person killed in Chicago this year,” Pfleger told Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed in a story about planned rally published earlier this month.

Pfleger said he hopes the visual will put others into action to prevent violence in 2017.

The city of Chicago saw a huge surge in homicides this year.

“It is our hope that those carrying crosses signifying Chicago’s slaughtered will bring a heightened reality to the magnitude of lives lost,” said Pfleger, who lost his foster son, Jarvis Franklin, in 1998 to a stray bullet.

Forged by retired carpenter Greg Zanis, who once built luxury homes in the western suburbs, the crosses are intended “to be a way for people to remember the names of the victim,” Zanis told Sneed.

Zanis estimates he’s made some 16,000 white crosses in his lifetime.

They’ve been on display in Newtown, Connecticut, after 20 first-graders and six adults were killed by a gun-wielding school intruder in 2012; placed where people died in car accidents; erected near the site of the Boston Marathon; and he placed crosses outside an Orlando, Florida, nightclub tragedy.

Contributing: Associated Press