NYPD officers under investigation for orchestrating marriage proposal
A trio of New York Police Department officers who helped orchestrate a traffic stop turned marriage proposal last week are under investigation for the incident, the department announced Monday.
Two officers from the 101st precinct in Queens pulled over Yehuda Coriat and his girlfriend, Sorah Oppen, under the pretense of searching the car for weapons and drugs, according to the New York Post.
Video of the incident, since posted on YouTube, shows officers briefly searching the car before popping the trunk to reveal balloons, flowers and the wedding ring. Coriat then dropped to one knee and proposed, with Oppen gleefully accepting.
In an interview with the Post, Oppen praised the officers for playing along.
“[The officers] weren’t on duty at the time,” she said. “They did [Coriat] a favor. They came in, dressed up, got the car and did the whole getup just as a favor.”
Coriat said he went to the police precinct in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of New York and asked the officers if they would help. He said the officers originally were supposed to be off-duty when performing the stop.
But NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said at a press conference Monday that it is now unclear if the officers were in fact not working at the time.
“Was it an on-duty or off-duty incident? Was department equipment involved? What was the origin of it?” Bratton said. “So we just don’t have that information at this time. They could face discipline if it was found that their behavior was inappropriate.”
He added that the incident was under review by the precinct commander to determine what, if any, department protocol was broken.
The NYPD did not respond with an update on the status of the investigation.
