Two Richmond, Virginia, roommates went into a local CVS drug store the week of Nov. 20 to purchase sliced cheese and were met with police after employees suspected them of robbery.
After Ricky Berry and Philip Blackwell entered the CVS, an employee told Berry that the store did not carry sliced cheese. However, a typically normal situation went south when all of the store employees suddenly disappeared.
In an exclusive with WRIC ABC 8 News, the two men were amazed that their simple trip to the store turned into an unwarranted police encounter.
For nearly 30 minutes, Blackwell, Berry and a third customer were in the store alone until Richmond Police arrived on scene.
“We looked around for probably 30, 45 minutes and we couldn’t find anybody,” Blackwell said. Berry told reporters that the third customer was there for Orajel for a bad tooth, but he also was ignored.
“Then the employees disappeared and we all became part of some weird event,” Berry said. Eventually, a police officer showed up and began to help the three men search for the missing workers.
“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 said. “A couple of minutes later, he got a call from the alarm company asking what was going on. He was laughing with us because, like, this is how weird, apocalyptic movies start.”
However, the employees did turn up. They were all hiding in a locked room in the rear of the drug store.
Berry recorded the entire incident on Snapchat. He also told his followers that he was being kicked out because the CVS employees were afraid of them. The news outlet said that there had been a robbery of some sort prior to this current incident.
“He just told us that we need to leave the premises or else we would be arrested for trespassing and that flipped the script on all of us,” Berry told the reporter. “We had no idea what was going on.”
ABC 8 reported that a CVS spokesperson has apologized to the three men. The spokesperson also said that the employee who made the 911 call will be questioned and retrained.
