Buster
Wedding Night Brawl Lands Bloodied Newlyweds Behind Bars
Hours after exchanging vows, a North Carolina couple exchanged blows at a Florida hotel, according to police who found the bride in a wedding dress covered in blood and the groom with injuries to his face.
Police were called early Sunday morning to the Hilton in Naples, where they encountered Stefanie Ginas, 32, in the hotel’s Salon room. Ginas’s wedding dress had “several blood spots down the front, and the left strap of her dress was torn,” according to a Naples Police Department report.
Ginas’s “face and chest were covered in blood, and she was crying,” cops noted.
Ginas’s mother told officers that the newlywed was involved in “some sort” of altercation with John Gerhard, 43, the man Stefanie had married earlier that evening.
Ginas told cops the couple had quarreled about her brother while in their hotel room, and that the dispute turned violent. Ginas suffered a “bloody nose, busted upper lip, and swollen eye during the altercation,” police reported.
Gerhard, who said that his wife head-butted him, had a cut on the bridge of his nose, swelling on his face, and dried blood on his pants.
Since Ginas and Gerhard each claimed to be the dispute’s “primary aggressor,” both were arrested for domestic battery. The couple, who live in Newport, North Carolina, were booked into the Collier County jail on the misdemeanor count.
Ginas and Gerhard were each released yesterday on $1000 bond.