Talk about a Texas-sized divorce. One woman from the Lone Star State used a rifle, explosives and a party to celebrate her divorce after a 14-year marriage. Kimberly Santleben-Stiteler, 43, held a garage party to watch the newly-divorced woman blast her wedding dress into a fireball in the Medina County sky. The bright, orange fireball was seen and felt throughout most of the county.
Santleben-Stiteler's shot sent a tremor throughout the Lacoste community, which is about 30 miles west of San Antonio last Saturday night. The subsequent blast also sent shockwaves through social media wondering, in Texas-ese, what the heck just happened?
"We were all getting messages asking if that was our explosion people were feeling and hearing around the county, up to at least 15 miles away," Carla Santleben-Newport, Kimberly's sister, told McClatchy newspapers. "It was like, 'Uh, is everything okay over there'?"
The divorcee said she wanted to eradicate just about every memory she had from her marriage, including the dress that she could've probably sold to make a few bucks. At first, she only wanted to just burn the dress, but then she had cold feet at that notion.
"I wanted to remove all things from our marriage from our house," Kimberly, 43, told McClatchy. "Photos in the attic, ring in the safe (but probably going to sell it) and the dress I wanted to burn.
"I had a lot of advice and suggestions from friends and family, like donating it for premature babies and baptism gowns. However, to me, the dress represented a lie. I wanted to have a divorce party to burn the dress."
The former bride wanted to celebrate her newfound independece by simply blasting the dress close to the party location, but a family friend who's a bomb technician advised her that she'd packed too many explosives. So instead of removing the explosives, they widened the target for a more fiery spectacle.
Kimberly shot the dress rigged with $200 worth of Tannerite — or 20 pounds — from 200 yards out on her dad's ranch. With so much Tannerite, it wasn't clear how safe the wedding dress explosion party would be from the blast site.
"We have a friend who is a bomb tech, and he kept saying, 'that's really a lot,' like five different times, when we told him our plan, so we had to back it up," Carla said.
The newly-single Texan glared through her scope, steadied the rifle and, then, with a slow, steady pull of the trigger, sent the dress blazing into the Medina County sky on the first shot. It sent the garage-watching party, most with hearing protection donned, into a cheer.
"On the one hand, it was like being on set of some action movie. The explosion was huge," Kimberly said. "It was liberating pulling that trigger. It was closure for all of us."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Scott McDonald is a Newsweek deputy night editor based in Cape Coral, Florida. His focus is assigning and writing stories ... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.
