Ricky Berry had simply gone on a spontaneous grocery shopping trip with his roommates to a CVS in Richmond when he had the police called on him.
Berry and his roommate, Philip Blackwell, walked into the store and asked an employee if they sold sliced cheese. When the employee politely said they did not, Berry and Blackwell spent another 30 minutes alone in the store with another customer, and they noticed that they suddenly could not find any employees.
“We looked around for probably 30, 45 minutes and we couldn’t find anybody,” Blackwell said.
The third customer was just as confused by the hiding employees, said Berry: “He was in the store before we were actually. He had a bad tooth, all he wanted was some Orajel. That’s all he needed.”
Finally, an officer with the Richmond Police Department arrived.
“We were walking around trying to find an employee, and the cop himself ended up opening up the emergency door, which set the alarm off,” Berry explained. “A couple of minutes later, he got the call from the alarm company asking what was going on.”
“He was laughing with us because, like, this is how weird, apocalyptic movies start,” Berry said.
Eventually, the officer found the employees: they were hidden away in the back room. The officer spoke to the employees and told the customers that they had to leave.
“He just told us that we need to leave premises or else we would be arrested for trespassing and that flipped the script on all of us,” Berry told 8News Reporter Jonathan Costen. “We had no idea what was going on.”
The officer, Berry said, was kind throughout the entire encounter and was only doing what he had been asked to do.