Groom Charged with Injuring Officer in Applebee's Wedding Fracas

When your wedding album is a police mug shot, you've had a bad day.

When you've seriously injured someone at your wedding dinner – and that someone is a police officer – your day just got a lot worse.

After Wayne Lydell Hankins, 43, of West Allis lost control while celebrating his nuptials at the Mayfair Mall Applebee’s restaurant and knocked a Tosa patrol officer to the pavement, the department was at first inclined to seek only a charge of simple disorderly conduct.

Somewhere between the hospital where the officer was diagnosed with a concussion and the District Attorney's office, some minds were changed.

Proving true the underworld adage that you don't assault an officer of the law unless you are prepared to do some serious time, Hankins was charged Saturday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court with one count of disorderly conduct causing great bodily harm. If convicted, he faces up to three years in prison and $10,000 in fines.

According to the criminal complaint, and as reported earlier in Patch after the arrest:

At 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, Wauwatosa police officers were called to Applebee’s after Hankins caused a scene that forced restaurant staff to move all other patrons out of his area. When officers arrived, they found Hankins sitting at a table with a woman and three children, and he was yelling loudly and profanely.

Hankins angrily told an officer he was there with his new family, celebrating his matrimony to the woman a couple hours earlier, and that his new stepdaughter, a 15-year-old, had "disrespected" him. When the officer asked him to quiet down, Hankins replied, “Let’s take this outside!”

The officer, backed by two Mayfair security agents, did, hoping to restore peace to the crowded restaurant. Once outside, though, Hankins continued to yell profanities about the girl, and then told the officers he was a "cage fighter" and was going to beat them up.

The Tosa police officer pulled his Taser out, while the others managed to handcuff Hankins. But still yelling about being a cage fighter and street fighter, he gave a lunge, thought to be an attempt to head-butt one of his captors.

Instead, Hankins and both mall officers toppled over onto the Tosa patrolman and knocked him head-backward onto the pavement. A second Tosa officer arrived and the now four-man squad were able to stuff Hankins into the back of a squad car.

Later, while booking Hankins, the first officer began to feel dizzy and his vision got blurry, and he was sent to the Wisconsin Heart Hospital where he was diagnosed with a concussion.

Hankins told officers he was on medication for mental health issues, but he stopped taking it to “clear his head for the wedding.” He added, “You know this isn’t over yet,” and when asked what that meant, he said, “I have to kill her” – meaning his stepdaughter. He explained that he needed to “kill her before someone else does, sacrifice her to God to show him I’m a righteous man.”

Hankins is currently being held in Milwaukee County Jail on $5,000 bond while awaiting trial, and he has been ordered over to the JUSTICE 2000 program for supervision.