The staff of a CVS in Carytown, Virginia disappeared for more than 30 minutes when two black customers came in asking for cheese. After wandering around the store, even with a police officer who arrived on the scene, they eventually found the employees hiding in a locked room in the back of the store. 

WATE reports that Ricky Berry and his roommate Philip Blackwell were then asked to leave by the officer or else they’d be arrested for trespassing. Apparently their presence had scared the employees off for some not-so-mysterioius reason.

“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 the call from the alarm company asking what was going on.”

Berry went on to explain that the officer was just following orders, but it still caught him off guard when they found out that just asking for cheese had sparked so much fear.

“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,” said Berry. “We had no idea what was going on.”

Berry and Blackwell say they reached out to the store manager with no response, but were told by a CVS spokesperson that the employee who called the police would be interviewed and possibly retrained.