Crosses at ‘Las Vegas’ sign honor California shooting victims

As cars passed the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign Monday, 11 white crosses planted nearby paid silent homage to the victims of the recent mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California.

Greg Zanis delivered the small crosses to the site of the sign Monday morning. All but one bore a black-and-white photo of a person killed in the shooting at a country-western bar Wednesday.

After delivering a larger set of crosses to Thousand Oaks, Zanis said, he went out for a drink with survivors and victims’ families. That’s when he met the brother of Justin Meek, 23, a California Lutheran University graduate who was killed in the shooting.

“He said, ‘Greg, it’s so important that Las Vegas is included because my brother loved Las Vegas,’” Zanis said on the phone Monday night. “So I made another set of photos.

“Any victim that asks me to do anything, I don’t care what it is, I’m probably going to do it. Vegas was where his brother’s heart was at.”

The retired carpenter stopped in Las Vegas on the way back to his home in Chicago. Zanis didn’t realize before installing the crosses that 12 people had been killed in the shooting, and he was unable to provide a laminated photo for one of the crosses.

Zanis said he was distraught in California a day earlier, after he spoke to the families of five victims.

“Ten hours of crying was more than I had planned for,” Zanis said. “But I never planned for it.”

He said building the crosses is the only way he knows how to serve the victims. He also lost a family member, his father-in-law, to gun violence.

“As soon as I tell them that, I’m no longer a therapist or an outsider,” Zanis said. “I’m one of them. I don’t want to be in this club, but I’m trying to make the best of it.”

He built 58 crosses for the 58 people killed at a country music festival on the Strip in October 2017, placing them at the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign in the days following at what became a makeshift shrine to the victims. He made another 58 this year to commemorate the anniversary.

The parking lot for the sign on Las Vegas Boulevard South was nearly full just after 9 a.m. Monday. Couples posed in front of the sign, and a man shouted over a megaphone, offering to take photographs of tourists.

No one seemed to notice the crosses. But Zanis said he doesn’t build the memorials for attention.

“To me, it’s all about the victims,” he said.

Zanis refuses to do more than three or four interviews after he builds a memorial, “and even that is too many.” A few national news organizations have asked to ride along with him when he delivers crosses. He won’t let them.

“I understand that they go to my memorials; that’s up to them. But I don’t want them to make it about me,” said Zanis, who builds crosses only at victims’ request. “The last call I want to get from any victim is, ‘Oh, Greg, you’re grandstanding.’”

Zanis started building the crosses for the Thousand Oaks memorial just days after he delivered 11 wooden Stars of David to Pittsburgh on the heels of a shooting at a Jewish synagogue. He has to build them early, he said, so that the crosses look presentable to families.

“I call ‘decent-looking’ two coats of paint,” Zanis said. “I want to do a proper memorial. I want to put my best artwork out.”

The crosses have been misunderstood as a political statement about gun control, Zanis said. His goal in building the memorials is to spread love and help victims and their families pick up the pieces after a tragedy, he said.

“I don’t know what else to do, and I think this fits me as a carpenter,” Zanis said.

Zanis expects to arrive in Chicago close to midnight Tuesday. Then, after a night’s sleep, he’ll wake up and start building more crosses.

A prior version of this story incorrectly described the wooden memorials Greg Zanis delivered to Pittsburgh.

Contact Kimber Laux at klaux@reviewjournal.com. Follow @lauxkimber on Twitter.