I was just checking the news re - Denver massacre, and I saw that Greg Zanis, the carpenter who built the Columbine crosses, is back in Colorado, with crosses for the victims here + and I read his story, of how he started to do this:
He didn't have the father-in-law that is the butt of jokes, the subject of shows like Monster-In-Laws - no, he and his father-in-law were best buddies <3 In fact, Greg worked for him : Ralph K Stadler had properties, he was a real estate guy, ironically in another Aurora (and one I'm somewhat familiar with), in Illinois ...
So it wasn't 'just' he was married to this guy's daughter, and had made him a grandfather ...
So Greg went over to one of the properties and he found out that his best buddy in the whole entire world, had been murdered by tenants he was trying to evict ... devastated, Greg responded in the way he knows: he built a white cross to mark the spot where he had found Ralph's body, because Greg, after all, is a carpenter, who knows what to do with a piece of wood ...
Now, if the story had ended there, Greg in my eyes, would already would be a good guy, for honoring his best friend with the very talents his best friend had taught him ... but then, Greg went on to become a hero:
From a news story, the paragraph that just brought my hands over my face and fresh tears: " He did it for others, a 6-year-old who was killed in a drive-by
shooting, children killed by drunk drivers. Every time someone was
murdered in Aurora, he put up a cross. He began putting them up in other
states, too. Soon, there were 200 crosses, in six states."
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