This woman’s husband died just one hour after wedding vows

Your wedding day is supposed to be full of joy as you celebrate the union between you and your partner. It’s not always simple; we’ve heard of the bride who invited her father and kidnapper to her big day as well as the bride who discovered her husband was still breastfeeding on the day of her wedding. Yet this story is as tragic as it is unbelievable.

Johnnie Davis, 44, was set to marry the love of her life and spend the rest of her years with him. She and her husband Toraze, 48, decided to get married on June 19, 2023 - also known as Juneteenth, the national day that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved black people in the US. Here’s the story of how fate threw them together and then tore them apart in the most unthinkable way.

Johnnie and Toraze’s relationship

It turns out that Johnnie and Toraze really were soulmates, and fate threw them in each other’s paths a couple of times before the stars aligned and they got together.

Johnnie first spotted Toraze driving down the street and they’d had a chat. She explains ‘there was a spark there’, but both Johnnie and Toraze were married at the time, so nothing came of the encounter.

However, years later, Johnnie applied to become a foster parent. She explains:

the boy I was asked to foster just happened to be Toraze’s son

He had been unable to look after him at the time, so when I saw him again outside a local shop a few years later, I called out to him

This time around, both parties were divorced; they started dating, and ended up getting engaged in 2017. A year and a half later, they had a baby girl named O’Ceann together. Johnnie explains that fatherhood suited her partner, calling him the ‘most amazing dad’.

Until death do us part

On their wedding day, Toraze was wearing a full suit. He kept turning to Johnnie, she explains, apologising and telling her he felt very hot and needed water. She thought he was maybe suffering a panic attack, as he kept telling her how much he loved her. Minutes later, he was dead.

Toraze collapsed at his own wedding, and was rushed to hospital. Johnnie, who works at a compassionate care facility for senior citizens and the disabled, explains that it all felt ‘surreal’.

Only 10 minutes before, we’d finished saying our wedding vows

Physicians fought to save the newlywed, but a blood clot had traveled to his heart and they were unable to revive him. Johnnie explains:

I begged them to save him. I’d only just lost my dad a few months before. I couldn’t lose my husband too.

Johnnie - who had recently lost her own father, her cousin, and the father of her first child - felt ‘broken’ by the pain of her husband’s passing. O’Ceann regularly asks her mum where her father had gone. Johnnie manages to keep a brave face for her children, so she focuses on the positives aspects of this tragic tale:

I just had to try and get some comfort from the fact that Toraze and I had actually had the chance to say our wedding vows, and pledge our love to each other.

She continues, ‘I’d thought I was the luckiest woman alive to have married Toraze. He was such a gentle giant.’ Johnnie takes O’Ceann regularly to visit her father’s headstone, hoping to ensure she remembers her father who loved her so much.

Read more:

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⋙ Prince Harry and Meghan Markle: The obscure Royal rule that forced them to return their wedding gifts

⋙ Bride-to-be dies before the wedding but the groom still had to pay for the caterer

Sources used:

The Sun: AISLE SAY I’m known as the one-hour wife after I was married for just 60 minutes – the best day of my life turned into the worst

New York Post: I’m the ‘one-hour wife’— my husband dropped dead minutes after we said ‘I do’