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I Would Say 'I Do,' but I Can't
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Stop the wedding! This groom isn't allowed to kiss the bride!
Florida cops nabbed groom-to-be Lonnie Causey, 62, minutes before his wedding Friday — charging him with ignoring a judge's order prohibiting contact with the bride, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
"I can't imagine a worse wedding day," his wannabe bride, Jackie French, 61, told the Sentinel.
In August, French called police to tell them the man ready to pledge his love for her, in sickness and in health, had shot a gun at her head after having too much to drink.
Causey, of Fruitland Park, Fla., faces a possible 20 years in jail after pleading not guilty Aug. 29 to aggravated assault with a firearm, shooting inside a dwelling and illegally possessing a firearm — all of them felonies mandating no contact with the alleged victim.
Assistant State Attorney Sue Purdy asked county clerks to hold up the wedding party after stumbling upon the kooky couple's marriage license Tuesday while looking over Causey's criminal case on the Web.
The forbidden lovers showed up with a few family members at 11 a.m. Friday for their nuptials — each sporting a ring for the other from Wal-Mart — with Causey clad in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans and French dressed in a black-and-yellow blouse and black pants.
"Everybody was excited," Causey told the Sentinel in a phone interview from prison.
While the marriage was the first for both in decades, it would have been the third for each partaker in prohibited passion.
"We'd been talking about it for eight months," Causey told the paper. "It was simple, yeah, but it was going to be special for us."
Causey had French's Wal-Mart ring clutched in his palm when cops burst in to prevent the illegal ardor.
"I didn't even have a chance to give it to her," he said.
The banned bride spent the Friday night that was to be her honeymoon trying to raise bail — and told the Sentinel she thought the no-contact order was null and void because she wouldn't cooperate with prosecutors and recanted her story.
"The man did not try to kill me," she told the paper. "I told a lie is what I did."
The no-contact couple has sworn that no prison walls will prevent their not-allowed nuptials.
"I still love her," Causey told the Sentinel. "I'm going to get married to her one way or another — in Folsom prison if I have to."
— Thanks to Out There reader Doug M. |
