For the fourth year in a row, a gender reveal party has ended in disaster in the US. This time, the child's father-to-be died after a device he was building for the gender reveal exploded.
Christopher Pekny, 28, from New York, was assembling the device alongside his brother on Sunday, who was injured and taken to hospital. Police haven't specified what device caused the explosion, but described it as some kind of pipe.
The death follows another earlier this month at a gender reveal, when a man from Michigan was killed after being struck by shrapnel from a 'small cannon type device' fired during the baby shower, according to police.
They make up two of many catastrophic events following a gender reveal announcement in the US. Last year in September, a California fire department reported a wildfire had been caused by a smoke generating pyrotechnic device used to announce a baby's gender. It has burned over 7,000 acres and caused 3,000 residents to evacuate the area.
California had been dealing with weeks-long wildfires at the time and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said that those responsible for fires because of negligence can be prosecuted
In October 2019, a woman was killed when a device that discharges coloured powder exploded at a gender reveal in Iowa. The year prior in 2018, another in Arizona caused a 47-000 acre wildfire and $8million worth of damage after a man shot a target meant to reveal the baby’s gender but said target burst into flames.
I feel like the guy who invented gunpowder.
In fact, there have been so many stories of disastrous gender reveal parties that in July 2019, the woman responsible for starting the trend, Jenny Myers Karvundis, said she had come to regret her actions – comparing herself to ‘the guy who invented gunpowder’. She blogged about revealing her baby’s gender in the form of blue or pink cake back in 2008 and was then interviewed by a magazine that spread the trend across America.
She questioned how elaborate and dangerous the reveals have become, and said her own daughter has come to educate her on gender fluidity. ‘Bianca tells me there are more than two genders and many sexualities. I hadn’t considered all this before,' she told The Guardian.
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A Woman Has Died At A Gender Reveal Party After A Couple Used Explosives For The Announcement