"The chance of being summoned for jury duty on your wedding day is low, but not zero"
35-year-old Katrina Badowski from Kansas City was just two weeks away from her destination wedding in Italy when she opened a letter in the mail and discovered it was a jury summons. The date she was required to appear for jury duty was August 31st — the exact day she was scheduled to marry her partner at the Vatican.
Katrina Badowski expected to receive invitations or other documents in the mail ahead of her wedding — not a jury summons. On August 14th, she opened a letter from the Wyandotte County District Court in Kansas and discovered she had been randomly selected to serve a week of jury duty starting Monday, August 31st.
The problem was that Badowski and her partner, 42-year-old Billy Rodriguez, planned to get married that day at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, having already paid for flights, the venue, and vendors for their destination wedding in Italy.
"My jaw just dropped like in a cartoon," Badowski said, recalling the moment she noticed the date.
The irony was particularly strong for her because she had actually wanted to be called for jury duty for years, but hadn't received such a summons in over a decade. According to her, she always thought it would be interesting to be part of a jury, especially if it involved a complex or high-profile case.
"But because it's a destination wedding, with all the flights, venues, and vendors already booked and paid for, it's just impossible for me to make it," she explained.
Amid the stress of final wedding preparations, the summons sat at the bottom of her to-do list for a few days. On August 20th, she sent an email to the court clerk's office, explaining that she was getting married that day and requesting to postpone the service to a date after her return from Italy. To prove it wasn't a creative excuse to avoid the summons, Badowski attached a link to her wedding website and offered to send travel documents as well.
The next morning, the response arrived from the jury clerk's office: "We have received your request and excused you from jury duty. Thank you and congratulations."
The response allowed her to return to wedding preparations, but Badowski decided the coincidental timing was too funny to keep to herself. She uploaded a video to TikTok showing the summons and wrote: "The chance of being summoned for jury duty on your wedding day is low, but not zero."
The video quickly went viral, garnering over a million views on TikTok and Instagram. In the comments, users began sharing stories of summonses that arrived at equally bad times — one of Badowski's friends said she was summoned for jury duty on the day she gave birth, and another person wrote that they received a summons on their 18th birthday.
Badowski and Rodriguez also found another amusing detail in the timing. Their first date was on a Monday, their engagement was on a Monday — and so was the wedding. Only this time, the judicial system almost joined their couple's tradition.
"I'm still hoping my jury duty dream will come true in the future," she said.
