There was something different about these last two crosses.
The pair looked just the like the thousands of other crosses made by Aurora carpenter Greg Zanis. White, wooden, 3 feet tall. Red heart in the center.
Another school shooting summoned Zanis to California last month to bring crosses to a makeshift memorial for two teenagers killed by a fellow student at a high school in suburban Los Angeles.
As usual, Zanis wrote the names of the victims - Dominic Blackwell, 14, and Gracie Anne Muehlberger, 15 - in black marker across the crosses.
But instead of heading to the next memorial in what has become an exhausting, reflexive ritual, Zanis, 69, decided to step away from his cross-building mission and hand over the role to another ministry for victims of mass shootings and natural disasters.
”I’m not a counselor. It’s just way more than I can handle,” Zanis said Thursday.
The numbers behind his Crosses for Losses nonprofit are staggering: Zanis estimates he’s built 27,521 crosses over nearly a quarter century.
He’s kept track of all the memorials, filling 79 notebooks with names and ages of victims.
For more on this story, read the Daily Herald.
Greg Zanis, of Crosses For Losses
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Greg Zanis, a retired carpenter from Aurora, built nearly 800 crosses for every Chicago homicide victim of 2016, which are on display in a vacant lot near South Bishop and West 56th streets, Thursday afternoon, Jan. 11, 2018.
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Greg Zanis, a retired carpenter from Aurora, displays a selection of the 2,000 crosses he built for America’s gun massacre victims in a vacant lot near South Bishop and West 56th streets, Thursday afternoon, Jan. 11, 2018.
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Greg Zanis, of Crosses For Losses
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
A cross for Chicago Police Cmdr. Paul Bauer by Greg Zanis, of Crosses for Losses, sits behind Supt. Eddie Johnson as he speaks during a press conference outside the Thompson Center in 2018.
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Greg Zanis, of Crosses For Losses
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Greg Zanis, of Crosses For Losses
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Greg Zanis, a retired carpenter from Aurora, built nearly 800 crosses for every Chicago homicide victim of 2016, which are on display in a vacant lot near South Bishop and West 56th streets, Thursday afternoon, Jan. 11, 2018.
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Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Greg Zanis of Aurora, mounts crosses on the front lawn of a Gage Park home, one for each of the six people found dead inside the house in 2016.
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Andy Grimm/Sun-Times file photo