Wedding-day hijinks are all fun and games until the bridegroom gets chased out into traffic, hit by a car, and ends up suing the wedding guests.
The incident happened in November in China, where, as the Telegraph explains, “wedding hazing” is a tradition dating back to the days of arranged marriages. Back then, friends and family members played jokes to “break the ice” between the bride and groom as they met for the first time; the ritual is also believed to ward off evil spirits, Asia One explains.
But in the case of 24-year-old Ai Guangtao, his friends went too far: After throwing eggs, beer, and ink on the groom-to-be as he went to pick up his future wife at her house, they ultimately stripped him to his underwear, taped him to an electric pole, and beat him with a bamboo stick.
Then, the final straw: Ai told a local website that he got fed up when the group poured ink on his face.
“Someone was chasing me and I couldn’t see very well because of the ink, then somehow I ran onto a motorway with someone tailing me behind,” he says. A BMW crashed into the road barricade trying to avoid him, then careened into him anyway, knocking him to the ground.
Ai ended up in the hospital for three weeks with internal bleeding and a skull fracture—and police also found him responsible for the accident and, thus, the damage to the BMW. The car insurance company hit him with a $4,372 bill.
Ai says he’ll now have to sue his friends; according to the South China Morning Post, the group had already admitted fault and contributed money toward his medical expenses. Ai and his bride had already officially wed before the big day (as many do in China), and there was no ceremony after things went awry.
(Another odd wedding-day prank: a staged ISIS kidnapping.)
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