Display of 26 crosses in Sutherland Springs bears names, messages for shooting victims
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS — Three days ago, Greg Zanis, a retired carpenter from Aurora, Ill., loaded white crosses with red hearts into his pickup. It is something he has done for 20 years: building crosses for the sites of mass shootings.
He built 49 crosses after the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 and 58 crosses after the recent Las Vegas massacre. Still, the shooting rampage Sunday in Sutherland Springs shocked him.
“I’m on my way to Texas,” Zanis, founder of the nonprofit Crosses for Losses, said in a YouTube video.
“There’s been a shooting at a church — a shooting at a church,” Zanis said in the video, shaking his head.
Zanis was one of several well-wishers who traveled to the small rural town. Zanis joined one preacher from Roanoke, Va., and another from Lubbock to bring crosses and condolences to Sutherland Springs.
By Friday afternoon, a line of 26 white wooden crosses affixed with red hearts and placed in the soil at U.S. 87 and FM 539 had become a de facto memorial to the slain. Each cross bore the name of a victim, along with messages from loved ones, scrawled in permanent marker.
People parked their cars on the side of the road throughout the day to pay their respects. In the background loomed First Baptist Church, now surrounded by a chain-link fence encased in black tarp.
Chaplains from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a North Carolina-based group that sends its members to national tragedies, consoled the mourners as they visited the memorial.
Vic Bass, the minister from Lubbock, brought 500 cedar crosses with the words “Jesus is the Lord” to Sutherland Springs.
“I just felt like it was something needed to help our nation,” Bass said. “Our nation is in turmoil.”
Todd Feltner, who lives about five minutes away from the church, helped Bass unload the crosses.
“It’s an overwhelming, just glorious response as far as the love and caring and the humanity of people who have come to help us in the wake of disaster,” Feltner said.
Joshua John Fitch, the minister from Roanoke, carried a life-size cross for five hours Thursday around the Sutherland Springs area. Fitch, 37, carried the cross 26 kilometers, one for each of the victims.
Fitch said he wanted to show victims that “they’re not alone, people do care about them. … People have come to honor people who have died.”
When he completed his long walk, Fitch planted the cross next to the 26 others bearing names of the victims.
Sandra Shaw, a member of First Baptist Church and a town historian, said she saw the various crosses as they were installed.
“Anybody who went to church there is going to be glad, because the victims are being honored,” Shaw said.