Sheriff Takes a Knee While Stopping Quarrel

At age 46, San Diego County Sheriff Jim Roache is not planning to have any more children. Just the same, he would rather not receive any more well-aimed knees in the line of duty or anywhere else.

While breaking up a fight Monday between a husband and wife, the sheriff took the wife’s knee in his groin before he pinned her face to the ground and ordered someone to handcuff her husband.

Roache came upon the fracas at 1:15 a.m. after he and two assistants--all dressed in plainclothes--returned from the scene of a deputy-involved shooting in Vista. As he made a left from West Vista Way to Emerald Drive, the three men saw a woman lying on the sidewalk.

Dan Greenblat, one of Roache’s special assistants, said the three men saw the husband, whom he described as a 200-pound, former hockey player, “slam-dunking” his wife’s purse on her face while she lay on the sidewalk.

Both husband and wife had been drinking, Greenblat said.

The man walked away, and the woman gathered her belongings, Greenblat said, but suddenly, the husband ran back toward her. Greenblat said he got out of the car, and the woman took a swing at him.

Greenblat and Rick Pinckard, the sheriff’s legal adviser, held off the husband. Pinckard produced his handgun. Roache grabbed the wife’s wrist, and she kicked him.

“It’s not the first time it’s happened; it’s about the fifth,” he said. “But I hope it’s the last.”

Roache pinned the woman face down, put his left knee on her back and pressed her hands onto the small of her back. Meanwhile, her husband, becoming more angry, charged Roache. Pinckard grabbed and handcuffed him.

Mark Richard Graul, 27, and Ellen Beth Graul, his 31-year-old wife, were arrested on suspicion of a felony count of obstructing or resisting arrest of an executive officer and misdemeanor vandalism.

Mark Graul was also booked on suspicion of felony spousal abuse. His wife was arrested on a felony count of battery on an officer with injury.

Both posted bail about nine hours after they were arrested.

It is not unusual for a wife to turn on a police officer, even when she is trying to avoid her husband’s wrath, Roache said.

“It happens frequently during domestic disturbances,” he said. “That’s why it’s so dangerous for officers in these kinds of situations. You wind up going to a female being endangered and, when her husband is subject to arrest, she turns on the officers.”

Roache, dressed in jacket and tie, said he identified himself as the sheriff, which had no immediate meaning to the couple until later in the altercation, when they threatened to sue “and that my name would be all over the papers.”

Mark Graul kicked in the door of a patrol car before being placed inside, Greenblat said, and Ellen Graul kicked the walls of the Vista sheriff’s substation.

Roache said any member of his 1,000-plus department would probably have done what he or she could to break up the fight.

“I would expect any officer, by chance encounter, to do the same thing,” he said. “I’ve been a law enforcement officer for over 20 years. I took appropriate action to keep from getting hurt.”