Paul Bevis was on vacation with his girlfriend of 3 months, her son and her brother and his kids. He woke up Sunday morning at the Red Jacket Mountain View Resort in North Conway, New Hampshire, his third floor room was full of smoke. WFXT-TV Boston reports
Bevis climbed over the balcony and dropped down to the second floor, then called for Beane to lower her son down to him. He carried the boy away from the hotel and then helped her brothers kids escape. When he went back for his girlfriend, he was stopped by the hotel management team. “They wouldn’t let me run back in, but I pushed them out of my way … I wasn’t leaving my girlfriend in there,” says Bevis.
His girlfriend, Meghan Beane, described what happened next. "Paul was up to the second floor and he screamed, you need to jump, and there was an officer down on the ground level on the grass and he screams, you need to jump now, and there was just this loud noise and I just jumped. I don’t know how Paul caught me because when I went over I didn’t go directly down,” said Beane. “I just dropped to get out of there before...I didn’t know what was exploding.” Paul caught her as she went by the balcony!
Once Beane was safely out of the building, Bevis needed a different kind of rescue. “When I did all that, I was in my underwear,” Bevis recalls. “Thank God some guy over the parking lot had a pair of sweatpants for me to put on...a very nice man.” Four people were transported to the hospital, but no one was seriously injured in the fire, in no small part because of the heroic actions of Paul Bevis.