Girlfriend of Navy sailor killed in theater shooting: 'My boyfriend saved my life'
Julia Vojtsek was watching "The Dark Knight Rises" with her boyfriend, John Larimer, on Friday at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., when a gunman fired into the audience.
Larimer, a 27-year-old Navy sailor from Crystal Lake, immediately shielded her from the gunfire, Vojtsek told WBBM radio Sunday.
He "held my head, and protected my whole body with his, and saved me," said Vojtsek, who is from Algonquin. "My boyfriend saved my life."
Vojtsek, a nursing student, told WBBM she was in Aurora because her father was there working.
"I'm hanging in there the best I can," Vojtsek, 20, told the station. "I'm just very, very sad. It's unreal that this happened."
The Sunday after the killings at the movie theater, Chicagoans dealt with the emotional fallout. Local activists called for an end to gun violence. Religious leaders prayed for the relatives of the dead.
Greg Zanis made a 1,000-mile journey from Aurora, Ill., to Aurora, Colo., to erect 12 crosses for the victims of the theater shooting.
Since 1997, Zanis has put up as many as 13,000 crosses in honor of people who have died — from drive-by shootings to car accidents to mass shootings. Most recently, he erected a cross in honor of a young girl in Chicago who was shot last month while she helped her mother sell candy.
Zanis' efforts have not always not always been appreciated. In 1999, when he put up 15 crosses near the site of the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., including two for the killers, a father of one of the victims tore them down. Zanis said he is sorry that the father was upset, but he doesn't regret what he did.
"I can't tell you how important it is to have someone from another state come (to Colorado)," Zanis said. "It's not just about their state and their whole city. It's the whole world … . We've lost our innocence."
Zanis first heard the news of the shooting Friday from his boss at his contracting job at a Chicago-area dance company.
"You're gonna go down there, right?" he recalls her asking. "I said I don't want to go there unless someone calls me."
The next day, Zanis, who said he received calls asking for a visit, spent three and half hours building the wooden crosses and then four more painting them white. On Saturday evening, he jumped into his Chevrolet Silverado and made the 15-hour trek to Colorado. On a little hill near the theater, Zanis put up the crosses.
A crowd gathered, including some of the people he met when he put up crosses in honor of the victims of the Columbine shootings. Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan stopped by the memorial, and the two embraced and cried as they contemplated the tragedy, Zanis said.
"It seems like I'm in another country where there is war going on," he recalled thinking as he surveyed the scene at the theater. "This should be happening in Iraq, not in our own country."
"I feel these parents are still losing their sons," Zanis added. "I am confident in what I'm doing."
Meanwhile, at a Sunday afternoon news conference in Chicago, theRev. Jesse Jackson, founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, called on Congress to revive the federal ban on assault weapons, a measure that expired in 2004.
"It's not enough to pray. We need to change the law," he said. "These military weapons have no place in our society."
