If your answer is, “What Derek Boogaard wore to his senior prom,” you are wrong. Well, at least as far as we know. But please do enjoy these TWO tales of great family relationships. First from Stu, second from Don S. Please do enjoy:

On Saturday, they were exchanging their wedding vows. But soon, they were exchanging blows — with each other as well as with members of another wedding party. … Dr. David M. Wielechowski, 32, of Shaler, a dentist, and his bride, the former Christa Vattimo, 25, each were charged with simple assault, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct. She also was charged with public drunkenness. According to a criminal complaint, the Wielechowskis had just checked into the Holiday Inn-McKnight Road in Ross and were ready to enter their room on the seventh floor when they began arguing. Dr. Wielechowski “then used a karate-style kick with his leg to kick Christa, knocking her to the floor,” the complaint reads. Upon hearing her screams, two guests of the hotel who had been attending another wedding reception ran to Mrs. Wielechowski’s aid. But when they attempted to restrain Dr. Wielechowski, he began fighting the would-be rescuers only to have Mrs. Wielechowski “turn against [them] and also begin to assault them,” according to the complaint. The fight moved from the hallway into an elevator, then spilled out onto the floor of the lobby, where Dr. and Mrs. Wielechowski picked up metal planters containing live plants and threw them into the elevator at the two rescuers, the complaint says. Police said both Dr. and Mrs. Wielechowski punched and wrestled with the rescuers, who were left with injuries that included cuts, a tooth knocked out and a possibly broken thumb. The complaint estimates $1,000 in damage to the hotel, including to the elevator, the planters and plants. … Neither Mrs. Wielechowski nor her husband would comment following their separate preliminary arraignments yesterday. Mrs. Wielechowski, still dressed in her wedding gown, was picked up by her father and taken home. No one was awaiting Dr. Wielechowski, whose left eye was blackened and swollen shut. He was arraigned wearing tuxedo pants, a bloodied T-shirt and one shoe.

It has karate, which makes it sports. This next one has a little better sports connection, though it can’t possibly be any funnier. Nope, it’s really more sad and slightly outrageous that a father could lose temporary custody of his son for accidentally buying him a hard lemonade at a baseball game:

If you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television. The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic. Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he’s more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching “Dancing with the Stars” — or even the History Channel, for that matter. The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114. “I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.” The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol. “Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report. He is cleared to go home.” … It would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

Good times.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.