Greg Zanis, who memorialized Oct. 1 victims with crosses, dies

Greg Zanis wasn’t a Las Vegan. Nor was he from Parkland or Orlando, Florida, or Newtown, Connecticut, or any other place that benefited from his compassion and determination to remember people whose lives were needlessly lost.

But Zanis, who passed away Monday, became part of the Las Vegas community as the Illinois carpenter who built and erected 58 simple white crosses in the shadow of the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign that turned into a focal point for a city’s grief after the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting in 2017.

For years, Zanis honored victims of shootings all across the country with his crosses, a heartfelt statement that provided comfort to thousands of survivors and family members.

Zanis, 69, died of terminal bladder cancer, a family spokesman said. Last week, while in home hospice care in Aurora, Illinois, Zanis told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he had been given six months to live.

He was home, surrounded by family, when he passed away.

“Nobody wants their loved one to be forgotten,” Zanis said of his mission. “It just means so much to these family members. It keeps a sense of a family member alive for everybody’s sake.”

Gov. Steve Sisolak said in a statement that he was “saddened” to learn of Zanis’ death.

“When our State needed healing, Greg’s crosses memorializing the victims of 1 October were able to bring some comfort to family and friends,” said Sisolak, who was a county commissioner at the time of the shootings. “My thoughts and prayers go out to Greg’s family at this difficult time.”

The genesis of Zanis’ decades-long mission was a personal tragedy: his father-in-law’s killing in a home invasion and the death of a 6-year-old in his town.

Zanis crafted 27,772 crosses over a span of more than 20 years, each representing someone killed by a violent act. He took crosses to Columbine in 1999, Sandy Hook in 2012, Orlando in 2016, Parkland in 2018 and El Paso just last October.

In October 2017, he came to Las Vegas to honor victims of the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting. Over about six weeks of public viewing, his array of crosses became an unofficial public grieving space where visitors left behind keepsakes and physical remembrances such as ball caps, cans of beer, photos, notes and flowers.

Dave Ahlers lost his daughter-in-law, Hannah Ahlers, 34, in the shooting. Ahlers recalled that Zanis made a second cross for Hannah’s husband, Brian, and gave it to Brian in Hannah’s honor.

For Zanis “to go out of his way and provide stuff like that to give comfort … just shows you God is working and God has a plan. The devil and men may do stupid things, but God has a plan,” Dave Ahlers said.

Zanis “helped make things better,” he added. “He leaves such a legacy.”

On the morning that the crosses were moved to the Clark County Museum, county and city officials read proclamations thanking Zanis. Afterward, Zanis said he was humbled because it was “the first time (my) crosses are being honored in a museum.”

Mark Hall-Patton, Clark County museums administrator, said the crosses and the items left on and around them addressed the community’s “sense of both grief and of wanting to come together.”

Hall-Patton met Zanis on the morning the crosses were taken to the Clark County Museum, where they are now part of the museum’s collection.

“He gave me a big hug, as he did everybody else,” Hall-Patton said, and was “quite proud” that the crosses would be maintained “in perpetuity.”

Jay Pleggenkuhle, co-creator of the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden, said Zanis helped Southern Nevadans grasp the scope of the tragedy.

“When you see so many crosses lined up, it makes you aware of what happened,” he said. “It’s so easy to hear on the radio or on the news, Oh, so many lost their lives. But the visual impact of what he did was amazing, not to mention the sheer compassion of a human being taking time out of his life to acknowledge the lives that were lost.

“He just made sure those people’s lives were honored, and he made sure everybody knows that (they) lived.”

Contact John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com. Follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.