Let’s Play “Guess Why This Person Broke Into Restaurant While Wearing A Box On Their Head”

While it’s not exactly a case for Adrian Monk (or even Encyclopedia Brown), police in Bismarck, ND, do have a puzzler of a crime on their hands after someone broke into a restaurant after hours and appears to have done nothing but walked around the place with a cardboard box covering his/her head.

As you can see from the above video [via Eater], while this is definitely a case of breaking and entering — the owner says the damage to the shattered front door is around $1,000 — the B&E artist seems to just make a circuit of the restaurant (again, while sporting a box over their head) without doing any further damage. The owner also says that nothing appears to have been stolen by the Box-Headed Bandit.

Using our detective skills honed by watching the occasional episode of NCIS (or is CSI?) while doing the dishes, we came up with the following theories:

1. It’s a restaurant employee who accidentally left behind his/her lucky rabbit’s foot and couldn’t get to sleep without it. The criminal had obvious inside knowledge of where to score an empty cardboard box and seems to move effortlessly through the building (as effortlessly as one can with a box on their head), indicating foreknowledge of the layout.

2. The restaurant could be a secret front for an international crime ring that involves drug cartels and multinational manufacturing/fast food conglomerates. The person under the box is a quick-thinking (but hot-tempered) high school chemistry teacher with nothing to lose (and a son who really, really loves breakfast). He obviously entered the restaurant to make off with incriminating evidence against the restaurant’s owner, who hides his involvement in the crime syndicate by donating to the local DEA Fun Run.

3. It was all an accident. In a hilarious confluence of events, a person with nothing better to do was filling a cardboard box with rubber cement while sitting on their fire escape while an unwitting pedestrian was walking down the street minding their own business. Something distracts the box-gluer and his “art project” falls four stories onto the pedestrian’s head. The pedestrian, blinded by the combination of box and rubber cement, stumbles into the restaurant and wanders around aimlessly until finding his way back out to the street.

4. Stupid drunk guy who thought there might be money in the cash register.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist