An armed robber forced three Benetton employees, including a Georgetown student, into the Wisconsin Avenue store’s basement where they remained for more than two hours until rescued by police. The suspect is still at large after escaping before police arrived.

No one was injured during the incident.

At 8:23 p.m. Sunday, a man described as a 5-foot-9-inch black man with a stocky build wearing a scarf over his face entered the store. He displayed a handgun and demanded money from the store’s register, according to Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Sgt. Joe Gentile.

Benetton employee Miki Wilkins (COL ’01), who remained in the basement until the SWAT team discovered her, said the suspect quickly became angry because the store’s alarm was sounding. According to Wilkins, the suspect said, “I’m going to kill [the store manager] if she doesn’t get the money out faster.”

Seven employees were originally in the store, but two managed to escape as the suspect entered, according to Wilkins.

The robber asked the five employees in the basement if there was a safe in the store. He put his gun to the throat of one of the employees, Wilkins said, and threatened to shoot him if they did not tell him where the safe was. All of the employees denied that there was a safe, Wilkins said, even though the store does have one.

“We were just hysterical, all of us,” Wilkins said.

She said that they remained in the basement because they did not know whether or not the suspect was still in the building. Shortly thereafter, two of the five decided to try to leave and escaped but were not sure if the suspect was still in the building.

The other three, including Wilkins, remained in the basement because they heard the police encounter the two who had just left and thought that they were hearing the suspect.

According to Gentile, at 10:45 p.m. the MPD Emergency Response Team entered the building and performed a search that found that the suspect had left the store. A member of the K9 unit also performed a search of the premises and found similar results.

Gentile said that MPD did not know when or how the suspect fled.

Wilkins said that when the SWAT team approached them, she was afraid that the police officers were the suspect.

“I thought, this is the guy, we’re going to die now,” Wilkins said.

Wilkins said that the suspect stole all of the money in the cash register as well as the money scheduled to be deposited yesterday. Wilkins said she thought the register had about $1,000 in it, and that an average day’s deposit is between two to three thousand dollars.

MPD closed off traffic on Wisconsin Ave., M and Prospect Streets in the area immediately surrounding the Benetton store.

The suspect was wearing a black cap, black pants and black boots. Because of the scarf he was wearing, no sketch is available of him, an MPD spokesman said yesterday.