You May Now Deck the Bride: Wedding Brawl in Philadelphia Leaves One Dead

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The day some people dream of their whole lives turned into a nightmare early Sunday morning, when two wedding parties at a Philadelphia hotel started a chaotic brawl that left one man dead.

Police were called to the scene, NBC reports, after two separate quarrels between wedding guests at the Sheraton Society Hill Hotel bar escalated into a full-blown melee around 2 a.m. More than a dozen officers entered the hotel, using batons and Tasers to subdue the fighting. A cellphone video recording from 15-year-old boy Max Schultz shows policemen swinging at guests with their batons. “Did they just deck the bride?” the boy asks as shrieks fill the lobby. “They just decked the bride.” Schultz was at the hotel celebrating his birthday and wasn’t one of the wedding guests, according to NBC.

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“There were tons of people, probably 75 to 100 people,” Schultz said. Two men in their late 20s were issued summary citations for disorderly conduct, while a third is still in jail. He’s expected to be charged with assault on a police officer. “There was an issue with a lot of alcohol fueling the fight,” police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

But the wedding-day headache didn’t stop there. As the fight carried on, a 57-year-old believed to be one bride’s uncle was pronounced dead of a heart attack later that evening. The man, Vincent Sannuti. who police say did not take part in the brawl, was found unconscious outside of the wedding venue, the Inquirer reports. He was pronounced dead a short time later at a local hospital.

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