As part of Project Management SE's cleanup efforts, I closed a question as not constructive. Afterwards, I went to leave a comment explaining why and noticed the post was locked by the Community user. Additionally, 3 of the answers on the post were also marked as both locked and deleted by the Community user.
The posts were marked locked and deleted at the same time as when I closed the question. Here is a link to the question: https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/2549/points-to-nail-down-when-agreeing-to-develop-software-on-spec
For those who aren't 2k users on the site, here is a screenshot:
Note that the locked and deleted times both say "37 minutes ago" At the time of this writing, it's been exactly 37 minutes since I closed this post.
Why did the Community user delete these answers and lock the post? There doesn't seem to be a pattern I can see. Two answers are from users without an account, due to migration, but the last answer belongs to an active user. Other answers were not deleted.
I did not observe if the answers were deleted prior to closing the post, but the fact that they were marked as deleted at the same time suggests they were not in fact previously deleted.
Out of curiosity, I reopened the question to see if the answers would be undeleted. They were still marked deleted. I also tried to check the post history but couldn't find any helpful information.
My motivation for asking is to gain a better understanding of how the system works. If this post were to be flagged to be reopened, should those answers also be undeleted? I ask because I'm not sure if they were originally self-deleted or moderator deleted and then the Community user decided to take ownership, or if there is something else going on that I don't understand or am not aware of.
UPDATE: With @animuson's help, we determined the migrated answers posted originally on the source site are deleted while answers posted on the target site remain.
With that said, the list of answers actually support my justification for closing the questions as a list/poll, yet only 2k+ users will see this.
Why does this happen? Is it inappropriate to undelete them?