Bride and groom have their home blown up by wedding guest who slipped away during ceremony
Liv Bridge
Featured Image Credit: ABC 7 Chicago/Tom Davis and Eleni Vrettos
It was meant to be the happiest day of their lives, but the newlyweds faced tragedy when their wedding guest slipped away and reportedly blew up their home.
Tom Davis and Eleni Vrettos were tying the knot the day after Valentine's Day when their Cicero, Chicago, home suddenly went up in flames.
The house exploded in the 2200 block of Central Avenue, while police said the suspect, who had been attending the wedding, was found in the rubble.
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The damage of the blast was so severe, it displaced 11 other families in neighbouring properties that had also caught fire from the explosion.
Speaking to WGNTV after the incident, the bride said: "I ran here in my wedding dress, like down the alley, and was watching from a neighbor’s yard.
"Everything was just smoke at that point,” she said after revealing she was told about the eruption just moments after saying 'I do'.
"I was still in my wedding dress, heels, no jacket, just standing and, yeah, just in shock," Vrettos added.
Meanwhile, her husband had to wear his wedding dress shoes, as they were the only shoes he had after losing everything to the blaze.
"Our first concern, of course, was our cats," he said. "And once we realized that there was nothing we could do, we returned to the reception, where we could at least be around people that loved and cared about us."
A body was then recovered from the debris and has now been identified as 31-year-old Anthony Avila-Puebla.
Police suspect the man blew up the house after having momentarily attending the wedding as a guest.
Cops say the man was also in a relationship with someone who lived in the house but did not disclose who, as per NY Post.
Surveillance footage shows Avila-Puebla parked his car about half a block away from the house while the wedding was in full swing and was taking jugs of 'some sort of flammable liquid' into the building.
Police claim he doused the home and caused it to set on fire but never came back out.
Although more than $57,000 has been raised for the couple via GoFundMe at the time of writing, the bride says she is mourning the loss of the family home she grew up in.
"The building belonged to my family for almost 40 years. Yeah, I grew up here, so I live, lived here, and I work in the community. And I mean, Cicero is all I really know," she said.