Weddings are chock full of ceremony and duty. Particularly for the best man. It could be booking the hotel rooms or finding an additional supply of champagne glasses. Or as a local cop found out recently, taking the bride to hospital.
On 29 January at around 10:00, officer Xu Yunzhong, with Jiangsu’s Xuzhou Traffic Police, was on duty as usual, stationed at a local expressway toll point.
Then the duty room called through instructions to attend to an accident that had occurred on the Lianzhou to Huozhou Expressway. There had been a rear-end collision and a person was injured.
But the vehicle in question also just happened to be a wedding car, and the injury had been sustained by none other than the bride herself.
The police arrived at the scene and found that a small white car had rear ended the wedding car, the occupants of which were the groom, his bride and a bridesmaid.
Officer Xu very quickly found himself playing the role of impromptu best man, taking on responsibilities to ensure the safety of the bridal party at the roadside and attending to the bride’s injury, that fortunately was not serious.
Xu then took the bride and bridesmaid to the hospital in person and escorted them into a treatment room, much to the bemusement of other patients and hospital staff, as per this report by the Yangtze Evening News.
Duly treated, the bridal party were able to go safely on their way to their wedding ceremony. They may have been a little late, but with groom in place, at least officer Xu did not also have to marry the bride.
Of course, this is far from the first time that local law enforcement has responded to the downright bizarre. Also on the roads, in October 2021, Nanjing’s finest were in the odd position of having to pull over a 10-year-old boy for driving a toy car down a public road.
Then there was the burglar who, in November, 2020, walked into a police station in Nanjing to complain that he was slapped about by the very person from whom he was looking to steal.
But still topping our list of police officers who go beyond the call of duty is the mother who, also in November 2020, called police to say her son was not doing his homework. During their increasingly heated discussion, the two had come close to blows. The mother felt she had little choice but to to ask law enforcement for assistance.
