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The Associated Students UCLA is re-examining its security policies after an armed robbery occurred in the Cooperage while no security guard was on duty.

The robbery happened when a man snuck into a back office of the Cooperage, which contains several campus restaurants and a seating area, on the evening of Jan. 5, the Thursday before classes began for winter quarter.

There was no ASUCLA security guard on duty during the robbery, which happened around 7:30 p.m., according to an ASUCLA official familiar with security policies.

As employees were closing the cash registers for the night, the intruder, wielding a sharp object thought to be a knife or scissors, grabbed a student employee and held her, demanding money from the registers, according to the employee.

Though the room containing the safe was open, the robber did not ask for any of that money, the employee said. He became frantic in demanding that the other employees bag up the cash, she said.

“I think he was freaking out,” she said.

He was given about $1,800 and fled from the building.

During the incident, the student employee – who asked not to be identified because the suspect has not been caught – was cut on her finger and required surgery the next week.

She said she did not realize what was happening, and so reached behind her back, at which point she was cut. She did not know if the laceration was intentional.

On Monday, university police released a detailed sketch of the suspect, who is described as a black male, 5 feet 10 inches and 180 pounds, with short black hair and brown eyes.

Bob Williams, executive director of ASUCLA, declined to discuss the association’s current security procedures or whether officials have made changes since the Cooperage robbery. But he said ASUCLA’s security is “very good” and that in the 26 years he has worked with the association, he did not know of another armed robbery occurring.

“Up until that moment, one would have thought that the system was very safe, safe enough, but clearly something happened that makes us want to rethink every aspect of what we do. And we will,” he said.

“If there’s a way I can make it safer, I will do everything possible to make it safer for my employees,” Williams added.

Williams said the presence or absence of a security guard had no bearing on the incident.

“Whether the security guard was here or not had nothing to do with what happened in this case,” Williams said. “In the instance of a robbery ... or an instance of this type, the security we would use is the police on campus.”

“We do not have security guards that play that role in the association,” he said. “There are no security people assigned to stop a robbery.”

Rather, Williams said, security personnel employed by ASUCLA do tasks such as making sure doors are locked or preventing shoplifting, but he declined to go into specifics of security personnel’s duties. He said managers are trained to handle similar situations, and “everybody involved in the incident did exactly what they were supposed to do.”

“Does that mean if we had a security person here they might be able to help in an incident like that? And help coordinate with the police? Well, they could and they might,” Williams said.

The student employee said her finger should heal completely in a couple of months, but her sense of security on campus was shaken.

She said that on a recent evening, she was afraid to walk a short distance from a parking lot to a campus building – “a 2-minute walk,” she said. But she is trying to force herself to do things normally again.

“I think I’m relatively okay, at least, (I am) now. I was just kind of in shock. You can’t really believe that kind of thing happens to you,” she said. “Honestly, I never really felt unsafe (in the Cooperage). It’s just very weird.”

UCPD encourages anyone with information about the incident or about the suspect to call UCPD at (310) 825-1491.