SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – Leslie Devaney was 3 days into her Puerto Vallarta vacation with her daughter when elevator doors opened to a terrifying scene. A day later, her primary mission was finding food.<\/p>\n
On Sunday morning, Devaney and her daughter took the elevator from their 6th floor beach area vacation rental to the first floor lobby for a stroll into town for breakfast.<\/p>\n
The elevator doors opened to chaos.<\/p>\n
“All of a sudden hordes of people rush in the small elevator very quickly, and we can see that one of them is a security guard from the front desk. The door doesn’t shut, and they’re saying, ‘Get up. Get up. Let\u2019s go. Let’s go. Let’s get up!\u2019” Devaney said.<\/p>\n
Through glass, she saw a man in black outside pouring something onto a burning fuel tanker.<\/p>\n
A local woman had also rushed from a different vehicle, into the elevator.<\/p>\n
“A local woman had run in the elevator and was very upset, and my daughter said to her, ‘Are you OK?'” Devaney said.<\/p>\n
“And she goes, ‘Yeah, that’s my car out there that’s burning. The cartel had pulled her out of the car, and then set the car on fire,'” Devaney said.<\/p>\n
When asked what was going through her mind inside the elevator, Devaney did not hesitate.<\/p>\n
“Fear for my life, and I thought, this is where I die,” Devaney said.<\/p>\n
Her panic lessened when the elevator doors became unstuck. Back in her condo, her view was a smoke-filled sky.<\/p>\n
“I heard more explosions, the popping of fire. I heard gunshots,\u201d Devaney said.<\/p>\n
Devaney and her daughter were eventually evacuated to another complex before finally being allowed to return to the condo.<\/p>\n
The next day, burned out vehicles stood feet from the lobby. Her daughter took photos of burned out vehicles and buildings as she rode in a taxi to the airport for one of the few flights that went out.<\/p>\n
Devaney’s flight home was canceled, but she was able to book a flight home on Thursday. With her fridge nearly empty, she went out looking for food. On Monday morning, a few markets had reopened, but she found long lines with only one customer allowed inside at a time.<\/p>\n
“We were walking the streets and I found this little sign of this little home, and then they were selling cheese, so I bought a whole baggie of some queso. I figured, I have tortillas, and I can make quesadillas, I’m good for awhile,” Devaney said.<\/p>\n
Devaney, still a little anxious, plans to stick close to her rental until her flight.<\/p>\n
“So, I’m happy I survived it, and I’m happy that they weren’t going after tourists. That could have been a whole other dynamic where I had to fear that people were going to come in,” Devaney said.<\/p>\n
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – Leslie Devaney was 3 days into her Puerto Vallarta vacation with her daughter when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2457,89182,74,76,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-191194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-mexico","9":"tag-puerto-vallarta","10":"tag-san-diego","11":"tag-san-diego-headlines","12":"tag-san-diego-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}