For those of you who may have missed the story when it broke over the weekend, an NYPD officer stopped off at a deli to pick up a sandwich on Friday. Upon biting into it, he discovered that there was a razor blade inside of the sandwich. Fortunately, he didn’t wind up with a serious injury beyond a small cut inside his mouth, but it was still a shocking event. We first learned about it via a tweet from the Police Commissioner.

To repeat: The NYPD has ZERO tolerance for acts of violence against our police officers. A sandwich bought at a Queens deli on Thurs. contained a razor blade that cut the inside of a @NYPDCT cop’s mouth. He’ll be OK, but a full investigation into this abhorrent act is underway. pic.twitter.com/nljW9Er2Uw — Commissioner Shea (@NYPDShea) December 6, 2019

My immediate reaction at the time (beyond disgust at the idea somebody would do this) was to suggest that the cops should be able to get to the bottom of this one pretty quickly. They would have to know who was working at the time and figure out who had made the sandwich, right?

Well, the investigation did take place, but strangely, the Commissioner has concluded that the whole thing was an unfortunate accident. (CBS New York)

The new NYPD commissioner says a disturbing incident involving an officer’s sandwich has turned out to be just a very unfortunate accident. Following a thorough investigation, Commissioner Dermot Shea says the razor blade that ended up in the plain clothes officer’s food was not placed there intentionally. “After a thorough investigation by @NYPDDetectives its been determined that the razor incident was indeed an accident-thankfully our officer or another customer wasn’t seriously injured. Appropriate agencies have been notified for follow up to ensure this never happens again.”

Assuming this is true, that’s at least something of a relief. But I hope the Commish will pardon me for having a few lingering questions. Something about this just doesn’t sound right.

You can look in the picture they tweeted and see that the blade in question is a very old school industrial razor. They aren’t used in shavers any more and they don’t really even fit in most modern box cutters. (At least not the ones I own, anyway.)

So this was a deli where the incident took place. How exactly did a razor blade like that wind up in the food preparation area to begin with? And how did it make its way into the completed sandwich without the deli worker noticing? If they cut their own deli meats, it’s tough to imagine how it could have wound up layered in with the slices of meat. If it was in a container full of lettuce, tomatoes or other ingredients, the worker would have had to jam their hands into the container multiple times without cutting themself.

Shea is saying that they’ve reviewed video from the shop and spoken to the employees. Does the video actually show the blade going into the sandwich or are you taking somebody’s word for it? It just seems to me that if something this unusual and outrageous wound up being written off as a freak accident, he would either release the video or, at a minimum, provide a more detailed explanation of what was discovered.

I don’t want to go diving headfirst into conspiracy theory territory here, but this just doesn’t smell right. More details, please, Commissioner Shea.