Maybe "cheese" sounded like "freeze" to the Richmond, Va., CVS workers who ran to the back and called the police on a young black man who asked for sliced cheese.
That's right; Ricky Berry had the audacity to ask a store worker for cheese, and for some reason—which I'm sure has nothing to do with racism or Donald Trump being elected to the White House—all the employees ran to the back of the store, WRIC reports.
Berry told the news station that he and his roommate, Philip Blackwell, walked around the store with another customer for 30 minutes looking for anyone who could help them.
"We looked around for probably 30, 45 minutes and we couldn’t find anybody,” Blackwell told the station.
The other customer was just as confused as Berry and Blackwell.
"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," Berry said.
A Richmond police officer showed up and was as confused as the customers as to what had happened to all the 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 explained. "A couple of minutes later, he got the call from the alarm company asking what was going on."
Berry said that the stunned officer walked around the store laughing with them because he, too, couldn't believe what he was seeing.
"He was laughing with us because, like, this is how weird, apocalyptic movies start," Berry told the station.
The employees were found in a locked room in the back of the store, but get this: Once they were found, the roommates were kicked out of the store. The officer made a few calls but still told the men that if they didn't leave, they would be arrested.
"We’re being kicked out because they were scared of us and hiding," Berry said in a cellphone video of the incident, the news station reports.
"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 WRIC. “We had no idea what was going on."
Berry added that the officer was just doing what he was told to do. Several attempts by the news station to contact the store's manager were denied. A CVS spokesperson apologized for the incident and said that the employee who called police would be interviewed and possibly retrained, the news station reports.
Read more at WATE.