Cold feet is one thing. Setting fire to the building your ceremony is booked in 24 hours later is an entirely different tier of pre-wedding meltdown. Police in Kaysville, Utah say 25-year-old Lenita Joy Moreno started a blaze inside a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on July 10 while family members were literally inside setting up chairs and decorations for her own wedding the next day.
Barstool broke the news of the arrest, with the arson happening the night before the ceremony was scheduled.
According to reporting on the incident, the fire started in the church's Relief Society room and was put out on the spot with water and a fire extinguisher before it could spread further, though it still reportedly ran up an estimated $108,000 in damage. Moreno is now facing aggravated arson charges, along with retail theft and providing false information to a peace officer, and is being held without bail. Investigators also say she'd allegedly been caught on store surveillance stealing cigarette lighters earlier that same day, which is not exactly a subtle detail to have on tape when your venue burns down hours later.
Here's the part that turns this from a weird local crime blotter story into a full-blown internet moment: the groom was reportedly in the room with her right before the flames were discovered. He didn't hear about this secondhand. He was standing there. Whatever was going through his head in that moment — watching the building he was supposed to get married in the next morning start smoking with his fiancee nearby — is the kind of gut-punch realization most people never have to process in real time.
The reaction to the groom's position in all this, watching his wedding venue go up in flames the night before.
What a look in the mirror moment it must have been for the groom. https://t.co/zFjkmW0XCE
It also turns out Moreno reportedly never actually obtained a marriage license for the wedding she claimed was happening, despite telling people she had. So on top of the arson and theft charges, the entire premise of the ceremony itself may have been fabricated. That's a lot of red flags to be waving less than a day out from an 'I do.'
There's no cleaner metaphor for a relationship falling apart than the actual church catching fire before the vows are even said. Whatever happens with the criminal case, the wedding obviously isn't happening on schedule, and the groom is now the internet's foremost cautionary tale about paying attention to the signs before you book the venue.