Squatter Found Sleeping in Norman Braum's

Norman Police are investigating a bizarre break-in at Norman Braum's. Police say nothing was stolen from the store, but a man was caught sleeping in the ceiling. 

Norman Police shared body camera footage from two officers who responded to the incident.

Just after 6 a.m. on September 9th, Norman Police were called to the Braum's near Porter and Robinson for a possible break-in.

“Apparently, somebody broke in,” a worker can be heard saying in the body camera footage.

Workers explained to the police they arrived to open the store and saw ceiling tiles broken and laying all over the ground. 

“They had arrived at the restaurant to open it that morning and there were ceiling tiles across the floor that had been broken,” Public Information Officer for Norman Police Department, Sarah Schettler, said.

Schettler says workers quickly realized that this incident wasn’t a normal break-in. 

“Got some dummy up in the ceiling,” one officer says on the body camera. “If you go up the ladder, he’s up in the rafters you’ll see him about 6 feet away.”

Due to the positioning of the body camera on police officers, you can’t see what officers are looking at in the ceiling, but they’re working to wake up Phillip Hickman, who was asleep in the ceiling of Braum's.

“Hey partner, Norman Police, you better come on out,” the officer said. “The guy's in the rafters, we can't get him to move or do anything.”

Schettler explained Hickman got up into the ceiling sometime between midnight after Braum's closed and 6 a.m. when workers came back to open the store the following day.

Police are still investigating how Hickman got into the Braum's ceiling, but they say he caused about $1,000 in damages along the way.

“They could tell the individual crawled some distance across the store, which is what caused that pretty significant damage to the ceiling, and really just fortunate they didn't fall through the ceiling,” said Schettler. “Pretty significant damage. I think that to the store quite a bit of cost, there were a lot of wires that were pulled and things that were in disarray in the ceiling area.”

Police say Hickman didn’t steal anything from the store but say, apparently, he just wanted a place to sleep.

“No food in the grocery area, no other parts of the store looked like they had been disturbed or anything was taken. They believe the individual crawled through the ceiling and found a spot, and that's where they were when officers found him,” Schettler said.

Norman Police and Fire Departments worked for about 30 minutes to coax Hickman out of the ceiling. When he finally came down, they took him into custody on complaints of breaking and entering and malicious injury to property.

Norman Police say they are still investigating the incident. We reached out to Braum's for a comment and did not hear back.