Earlier this week, The Atlantic’s David Graham shot a Rabbit Hole flare high up into the sky:

The headline here: “Man breaks into Little Caesars, starts making and selling pizzas, NC police say.”

To paraphrase Ric Flair, I can’t be the first one to tell this story, but I suppose I can be next. The story ping-ponged around North Carolina media this week, even landing on people.com. Almost all of those pieces seem to be based on a single Kinston Police Department Facebook post, which noted, dryly, that on Sunday, February 1st, “[Jonathan] Hackett entered the business, prepared pizzas, sold them to customers, and kept the proceeds for himself. During the second incident, Hackett again broke into the business while it was occupied by employees. Employees attempted to prevent Hackett from entering, which resulted in a physical altercation.”

This story, as much as I can tell, is precision-made for Internet Take Generation, because it is impossible to hear a phrase like “man breaks into pizza shop and starts selling pizzas” and not think: I am compelled respond with something clever, for the world must know my rapier wit! Hence, this story spawned a lot of Hot & Ready jokes.

But! While most overworked reporters simply found the Facebook post, wrote up a story, and called it a day, I decided to dig further. There is a deeper truth here, one that can only be surfaced by dogged, old-school, shoe-leather reporting. That led me to the holy grail. A document reveals so much more. That’s right: I got the public record narrative from the police How? By emailing the chief and asking for it. Also! While the Kinston Police—perhaps wisely—turned off comments on their original Facebook posts, many people shared that post, including some folks who said they got a pizza from Hackett. So! Here’s what we know.

Last Saturday, parts of Kinston got 15 inches of snow, which appears to have beaten a local record set during a blizzard that hit North Carolina back in March of 1927. As you might imagine, Kinston is not really prepared for 15 inches of snow. The mayor declared a state of emergency and put a curfew into effect from Saturday evening until Sunday at noon. Only people going to work were allowed to be out.

At some point during the storm, Jonathan Hackett decided to go to Little Caesars on Vernon Street (which, before 2012, was a pawn shop). He later told police that he had no trouble getting in: He used to work there and still knew the code to the lockbox. He also said that he’d gotten permission the night before from the manager to sleep there.

Then, Hackett decided to fire everything up and make some pizzas. As a former employee at Pizza Joe’s of Cortland, Ohio, I can tell you that the process is not all that complex. You take a greased pan with dough spread across the bottom, toss on some sauce and toppings, slap some cheese on it, and pop it on the conveyor belt. It comes out of the oven a few minutes later all finished. Usually, your dough person would make the dough and spread it in pans at some earlier part of the day, and you’d just have a ton of prepped pans ready to go in the fridge. Can one man crank out a bunch of Little Caesars pizzas by himself? Lord, yes.

But! How, exactly, do you move product? After, you know, the worst snowstorm in your city’s history? When your pizza place is, technically, closed? Facebook, that’s how.

“For those that live around little caesars, they are giving out free pizza,” read one post. “Go get you one 💯”

It worked. At least one man said, in Facebook comments, that he walked over to Little Caesars and walked away with a free pizza. “Hell yea he told me just pay when I come back,” the man said. “Ik something won’t right but shxt it’s free my kids loved it.” Other people seemed to confirm this: They posted that they saw him walking down Vernon Street with a large pizza in tow.

Others weren’t so lucky. “I don't believe this! I literally bought a pizza for $10 from this clown! I thought Little Caesars was actually open! Well, my dumbass knows next time never to trust something that that again,” wrote another guy.

“still got a pizza tho lol,” someone commented.

“well, yeah. I was hungry,” he replied.

In the end, Hackett told police he sold 10 pizzas a $5 apiece and kept the money, although some people reported paying $10, and others paid nothing. The news spread around Kinston. “I saw someone post on their Facebook story that they had got one and to go get yourself one,” one woman told me. “So I thought it was a courtesy the company was doing.”

At some point, Hackett left, and a family arrived. The store manager was working late Sunday night to get ready for the next day, and her husband and two sons came with her. Everyone was asleep, when someone heard a noise. It was Hackett in the room. The husband was awakened by a figure in the room: Hackett. That’s when the fight ensused. The husband told police that he was “about to do my thing” when Hackett swung at him and ran, so he chased Hackett down, confessing to police that he was “whooping his ass.” His son came outside, saw his dad holding Hackett, and “did what he had to do.”

The manager called the police, and told them that they’d detained a trespasser. When two officers showed up around 9:30, Hackett was being held down outside, bleeding from his face. For his part, Hackett told the police that he didn’t know why he’d been chased and beaten up. Again, even though he was a former employee, he said that the manager had given him permission to come into the Little Caesars to sleep. He did admit to selling pizzas, though.

Admittedly, there’s a lot we don’t know. I tried to contact the other folks who said they bought pizzas from Hackett and got no reply. I couldn’t find a local address for anybody involved. The police chief didn’t have much to add, but told WITN-TV that “It’s nothing we’ve ever seen, you know, in my 26 years of law enforcement here in Kinston. So, this was a head scratcher and a first for us.“ The Lenoir County Jail confirmed to me that Hackett was still in jail as of Thursday night. I asked the duty officer if Hackett wanted to talk to a reporter, and got a quick no. I then called the Kinston Little Caesars and asked if I could speak to the manager. The woman on the line said she wasn’t in. I asked when she’d be coming back. “She’s not,” the voice said.

Hence, it’s hard to pick apart the whimsy from what seems like a serious situation. On one hand, Hackett appears to have been looking for a place to stay, ended up in Little Caesars (one person posted that he saw kids inside with Hackett), and then started selling pizzas to people when they showed up at the store. On the other, Hackett now faces a felony breaking and entering charge, along with larceny and curfew violation. He might go to prison over $50 worth of pizza.

Folks seem to be sympathizing with Hackett and treating him like a minor folk hero. Some said he was merely serving people who were looking for food after a pretty bad snowstorm. Others just loved the WTF of it all. And other people stated that this was, maybe, the most Kinston story ever which, despite being a one-time foodie destination with two chic hotels and a big airplane facility just out of town, is still a town where inequality is rampant, and the struggle is real for a lot of folks. The place took a direct hit from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and parts of it have never really come back.

In any event, my attempts to understand this story remind me a lot of serving on a jury. You get parts of a story presented to you from a number of witnesses. But! That story has big holes, and your attempts to fill them with more facts just isn’t possible, so any attempt to pass judgment is at least somewhat flawed. I have no idea why a man decided to go into a closed Little Caesars, fire up the oven, and sell pizzas. But that’s exactly what he did, and now we all know about it.

In any event, a nation has turned its lonely eyes to the next small town fast food curiosity: The mystery of a dude getting a back tattoo inside of a Wendy’s dining room in Gastonia.