Las Vegas Man Tells of Hunting Frantically for Family After Fire

A Las Vegas engineering executive on Friday recalled how he had searched frantically for 4 1/2 hours before finding his wife and two sons who were trapped in a Puerto Rico hotel fire in which his mother apparently died.

Roger M. Peltyn said he has little hope that his 76-year-old mother, who was in the hard-hit casino area, survived the blaze.

“I think all the names of survivors have been released, and hers is not on the list,” Peltyn told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a telephone interview.

Escaped by Helicopter

Peltyn’s wife and sons were more fortunate. They fled their 19th-floor room Wednesday afternoon and escaped by helicopter from the roof of the burning Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan.

Peltyn, who had been near the pool when the blaze started, searched frantically for his family before finding his sons on a street near the hotel at about 7:30 p.m. He later found his wife, Sandy, at a hospital, where she had been taken for treatment of smoke inhalation.

Peltyn, 44, said that he was at the pool when he noticed smoke on the lower floors. He walked to the pool phone and called his wife in their room.

“I suggested quietly that maybe she and the boys might come on downstairs just in case something was seriously wrong,” he said.

Peltyn said he then stepped away from the phone and had walked about 20 feet when the first of three explosions ripped through the air.

‘Definitely a Bombing’

“It definitely was a bombing,” he said. “I was there when they went off--boom, boom, boom.”

Peltyn said he turned and saw that four people had been killed on their lounge chairs by flying glass next to where he had been standing.