Memorials and crosses fill tidy lawns in grieving town
NEWTOWN, Conn. — It’s a grey day. A misty rain is falling. The light is beginning to fade and Greg Zanis, 62, is pencilling in another name of a dead first grader on a stout, white, wooden cross.
He has built 26 of them — one for each of the 20 children and six adults murdered Friday at Sandy Hook School in Newtown. The crosses stand about four feet high and are made out of two-by-fours. So they are sturdy crosses that stand on their own base and should last a long time.
He built them in his workshop in Aurora, Illinois, and then drove day and night to get to Newtown and find a place to line them up. Ray Ruzek, 65, a financier, allowed Greg to install his crosses on the lawn in front of Ruzek’s Heaven Ice Cream Parlour, a family business just off the main road at the centre of Sandy Hook village.
“The traffic was really backed up here and Greg stopped with his truck full of crosses and said ‘Can I put up a little memorial’ and I said ‘sure,’” Ruzek said.
Zanis has erected his memorials at “way too many” massacres. It’s not that he’s a massacre groupie, he says. He just feels the need to do it, like a calling to “show the carnage”, a word he repeats several times.
“I was at Tucson, Arizona, for the Congressman Gifford in Jan. 8, 2011. I was at the Red Lake school shootings in March 21, 2005. I was at Columbine High School, which happened quite along time ago. And I went up to the Shiite (he means Sikh) temple in Wisconsin.”
He wipes down each cross with a towel before pencilling in the names and ages of the victims.
“I’m trying to individualize them, of course,” he said. “I never had to make this many before.”
Zanis said each cross is “like a prayer.”
There is no cross for the killer, Adam Lanza, 20, or for his murdered mother, Nancy.
“This guy goes straight to hell and burns for eternity,” he said referring to Lanza. “And I believe he is getting his just punishment.”
“I NEVER HAD TO MAKE THIS MANY BEFORE.” GREG ZANIS
He drops to his knees and pencils in another name Benjamin Wheeler and writes ‘6’ underneath.
He said his first cross was for Nico Contreras, 6, who was murdered in his bedroom in Greg’s hometown of Aurora Nov. 10, 1996.
I ask him his thoughts on gun control.
“I have a .45 in the truck,” he says, gesturing towards his white pickup.
“I’m not the villain. If somebody had a gun here, one of these teachers, the carnage would have been a lot less. What do I think about gun laws? I think you should have every single teacher carry. The whole country. We need to end this.”
He’s in a hurry. He says he has to drive back to Illinois tonight to start work in the morning and bends over to pencil in the last name on the last cross in a line of 26 in front of ice cream heaven.
Makeshift signs written on white cardboard and bed sheets and plywood are everywhere in Newtown. Many say: “Pray for Newtown.” One says “Support our Families; remember our Hero’s.” Another says: “We love You Sandy Hook Elementary”. Yet another, attached to a railway bridge, states: “There is no foot too tiny that it leave an imprint on this world.” These signs often attract their own little memorial as people attach coloured balloons or deposit bouquets of flowers and teddy bears. The Sandy Hook village Christmas tree, itself strung with multi-coloured lights and candles, has become the unofficial town memorial.