Greg Zanis
Greg Zanis was an American carpenter known for building and delivering personalized crosses to shooting victims across the United States.
Early life
Zanis was born in Spokane, Washington, and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, to a father who was a Greek Orthodox priest and a mother who was a Greek immigrant and worked as a seamstress. The family spoke Greek at home.Crosses for Losses
The first cross that Zanis built was for his own father-in-law, a murder victim. Shortly after the 1999 Columbine [High School massacre], Zanis constructed 15 crosses 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.Since that time, Zanis built and delivered over 26,000 crosses, and also some Stars of David and some crescents, to sites of mass shootings and natural disasters across the United States. He later founded an organization named "Crosses for Losses" to raise funds for this effort,. During that time, he kept handwritten notebooks of the names of the victims for whom he built memorials.