Two gunmen invaded a Nordstrom Rack clothing store in California on Thursday night and took 14 employees captive, sexually assaulting one, stabbing another and locking the detainees in a storage room for hours, police said.

The gunmen were nowhere to be found by the time police entered the Los Angeles store shortly after 2 a.m. on Friday and rescued the employees.

The armed invasion at Nordstrom Rack at the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center on Thursday in the middle-class Westchester district of Los Angeles was treated as a robbery, said Los Angeles police spokesman Lieutenant Andy Neiman.

Read more at Reuters