Karyne Constance Messina and Shehzad Syed Akhtar are to be married Oct. 7 at the Evergreen Museum and Library in Baltimore. Dr. Imran I. Ali, an uncle of the groom who was ordained through American Marriage Ministries for the event, is to officiate.
The bride, 37, will take her husband’s name. She is an assistant state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, Md., in the special victims and family violence unit, which handles cases involving domestic violence, child abuse and human trafficking; her office is in Upper Marlboro, Md. She graduated from Syracuse University, and received a law degree from Roger Williams University.
She is a daughter of Karyne E. Messina and Gary S. Messina of Washington. The bride’s father is a business management consultant in Washington. Her mother is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in Chevy Chase, Md.
The groom, 40, is an assistant United States attorney in Washington, working as a prosecutor in the felony major-crime section. He graduated from the University of Maryland and received a law degree from George Washington University.
He is a son of Mehro Akhtar and S. Zaheer Akhtar of Ellicott City, Md. The groom’s mother is a research program administrator, in Columbia, Md., for Johns Hopkins University’s capital-region research office. His father works for the Bechtel Corporation. He is a senior systems integration engineer and a principal engineer for a subway construction project in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The couple met in 2011 when the groom also worked as a prosecutor in the state’s attorney’s office in Prince George’s County.
