New York’s Deserted In-N-Out Burger Mystery of 2019 Appears to Be Solved

One of New York City’s most ridiculous food mysteries has apparently been solved.

Earlier this week burger superfans across the city were stumped by an unlikely find on a Queens street: a perfectly wrapped In-N-Out burger. The extremely popular West Coast burger was found in Jamaica last Saturday at 6:30 a.m. and instantly grabbed New Yorkers’ attention. How did it get there? How did it still look fresh? Was it a TV prop? Was it a marketing scam?

But no one became as obsessed with the matter as Lincoln Boehm, the man who originally found the meaty specimen and has now tracked down its supposed origin after posting about it on Instagram.

According to Boehm, who unveiled the discovery today on Vice, the culprit was a 16-year-old Flushing student named Helen Vivas. The story goes: Vivas brought back four burgers from San Diego on her flight home to New York, taking special precautions like refusing sauce and packing vegetables in separate bags to ensure freshness. She ate one of the burgers on the flight, but the other three arrived with her at JFK at about 5:30 a.m. Later, when she was running across the street to catch a bus home from the airport her greasy bag of burgers split open — and a Double-Double tumbled out.

Boehm found the burger at about 6:30 a.m., and the story soon went viral. He has since started selling T-shirts online sporting a fake Jamaica In-N-Out logo, the proceeds of which are going to the NYC Food Bank.

He has apparently corroborated Vivas’s story through Instagram stories and text messages about the incident. And now we can all go back to eating Shake Shack burgers like normal New Yorkers.

• I Found NYC’s In-N-Out Burger and Solved the Mystery of How It Got There [Vice]