Metuchen cop stops assault after proposing marriage
Officer and brother save St. Pat's priest from assailant
BY JAY BODAS
Staff Writer

METUCHEN - Tara Dalton probably never imagined the moment of her proposal would go quite like this.

Last week, just seconds after proposing to Dalton at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, her fiancé, Metuchen Police Officer Daniel Granato, stopped a man who was accosting a priest inside the cathedral.

That Nov. 8 morning had started out mostly according to plan.

"My fiancé, Daniel, had planned a day in the city, telling me that we were going out for dinner and a show as my Christmas present," Dalton said. "We were going to spend the day with his brother and sister-in-law."

Originally, Granato had planned to propose at Rockefeller Center, but he opted for the cathedral due to the poor weather that day.

"My older brother, John, who is a state trooper, got permission from the priest for us to go behind the main altar to the wedding chapel in between the 12 and 12:30 p.m. Mass, so that I could propose to Tara there," Granato said.

That was when Dalton, 25, got to see her future husband in action for the very first time.

"We were basically going to call the limo driver to come and get us, and we were talking to two security guards there when we heard a commotion on stage," said Granato, 28, who is now in his fifth year as a Metuchen police officer. "We saw a guy fighting with the priest who was giving the second Mass, and the guy was yelling some obscenities into the microphone."

"The man was yelling things like 'I am the son of Jesus,' and 'Joseph and Mary are his parents,' " he said.

Granato, his brother, and the two security guards they had just been conversing with took off for the stage. It took all four of them to detain the deranged man.

"We grabbed the gentleman and escorted him off to the side ... and held him to the ground to detain him until NYPD arrived about two minutes later," Granato said.

Meanwhile, all Dalton could do was watch her new fiancé in action, something she had never seen before.

"It all happened within seconds of the exhilaration of the engagement, with him running down the aisle doing his job," she said. "I had never seen him do that before. In Metuchen, things like that don't usually happen."

But the happy couple did not let the momentary excitement interfere with their day's plans.

"Afterward, Daniel and his brother met us in the front of the church, and it was business as usual," Dalton said. "I'm proud that he could jump into 'police mode' that quickly and then go back to being my boyfriend right afterward."

Granato summed it up by saying his and his brother's reaction was simply "second-nature."

"When you're a police officer, you're always a police officer," he said.