Memorial crosses returning to DuPage Co. complex

Twenty-two steel crosses honoring DuPage servicemen who died fighting the war on terror will be relocated on the county compound in Wheaton after being unceremoniously removed before Thanksgiving.

County officials on Tuesday said the crosses will be installed again within 10 days at a safer and more accessible site near the permanent granite memorial honoring all of the county's fallen troops dating to the Blackhawk War.

"That's great," said Wheaton resident Dave Larson, whose son, Nick, was a Marine lance corporal killed in Iraq in 2004. "That makes me very happy."

But some officials aren't happy. Several county board members are demanding answers about why the crosses were removed in the first place and are demanding apologies to families who weren't notified the memorials were being removed.

"These were set up to help comfort these families and now it's had the reverse effect," said board member Grant Eckhoff, who spent several hours on Thanksgiving trying to locate the crosses that were cut away from their concrete moorings.

Terry Owens, a county employee who also serves as the president of the DuPage Veterans Memorial Inc., has said the crosses were removed because they posed a safety risk to visitors who might slip down the adjacent hill and into a pond. He also said the crosses always were intended to be temporary and once the names of fallen military troops were added to the permanent granite marker, the crosses were to be removed.

Owens did not return calls seeking additional comment Tuesday.

World War II veteran Herb Wehling is a neighbor of the Larsons who spearheaded the cross project. He said there was a "handshake agreement" to keep the crosses up until after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended.

"I'm shocked that a county employee would do this having been a county employee myself for 27 years," Wehling said.

Wehling said the county also agreed to repair the crosses when they are reinstalled by coating them with a special paint at the base to keep them from rusting.

Larson said he was saddened to see the crosses removed when he went to visit his son's marker on Thanksgiving.

"I know there's a granite marker, but you look and there are veterans from the Spanish-American War and that's for wars that have passed," he said. "These crosses are for here and now and they should stay up until the end of the war."

Board member Debra Olson said Owens owes the families of the fallen servicemen an apology for not letting them know the crosses were going to be removed.

"I'm just disappointed that the lack of communication made this a very upsetting situation for a lot of people and Mr. Owens owes a lot of people an apology and I hope that will be forthcoming," Olson said.

County board spokesman Jason Gerwig said the county board will have more oversight in the future on policies regarding the veterans memorial and the crosses specifically. It hasn't been decided whether the crosses will remain up until the end of the war or if they'll be retired at a special ceremony in the future.

"We will work with everyone to determine a policy of when they will come down," he said.

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