Sonya Deville Opens Up About Stalker Breaking Into Her Home: “One Different Move In Any Scenario, We Wouldn’t Have Made It”

A candid recount from Deville.

Guest appearing on the newest episode of Insight with Chris Van Vliet was former WWE talent Sonya Deville. As their conversation moved along, Deville opened up about her home being broken into by a stalker while she and Mandy Rose were sleeping in the house.

This happened in 2020, and Deville spoke candidly about the night it happened. She recounted the police taking him down and asking why he was standing at the bottom of the staircase with a knife and pepper spray. He thought Deville ran upstairs, but she and Rose jetted out of the home to get away in a vehicle. The stalker, Phillip A. Thomas, told law enforcement that he knew Deville had MMA training, so he was going to pepper-spray her when she came downstairs.

“So I had responded back to him on my ex’s account, saying, ‘You have the wrong address, idiot.’ Because I was so scared that this guy was gonna show up at her house and try to hurt her. But, by doing that, I let him know that he had the wrong address. So when he broke in two months later, it was to my address, and Mandy (Rose) slept over that night. We were filming in Tampa or Orlando at the time. It was during the pandemic… And so Mandy slept over, and we went out to dinner, we went to Ocean Prime, we had a great night. We come back to my house and we’re watching Bates Motel on the couch, which was not the greatest show to be watching right before that but, and we were just hanging and Mandy fell asleep on the couch. It was like 1 AM or something like that — maybe like midnight — and I was dozing off on the couch and I was about to just let us both sleep on the couch because it was a very comfy couch and we were so tired. I was like, no, let me wake Mandy up and tell her to go to the guest bedroom. So I’m like, ‘Get up, friend. Go to the guest bedroom,’ I went to my bedroom. Thank God. I grab my phone. As I’m falling asleep, I turn on the alarm system from my phone. I throw my phone in the bed and it was pitch black. 2:43 AM I think it was, I hear my alarm system going off, and I’m like, ‘What the f*ck?’ Now, my room’s pitch black. My phone is somewhere in the bed and I can’t find it, I’m freaking out. So I get up and I run to the alarm panel on the wall outside of my room, and it says, ‘Living room door open,’ and so my immediate thought was, Mandy must have went outside. She must have not thought I set the alarm. Maybe her boyfriend called or something and she ran outside. So I run into her room and she’s f*cking dead asleep, and I’m like, okay, well, if Mandy’s not outside and it says, ‘Living room door open,’ what the f*ck is going on? 

So I started screaming. I’m like, ‘Mandy! Get up! Get up!’ She’s coming to and she’s like, ‘What?’ And I’m like, ‘Stay there!’ So I leave her there because it’s the back of the house and I run to the living room by myself, turn on all the lights and my blinds are drawn over the two sliding glass doors. So I don’t know which one’s open. There’s two different doors. They’re kind of perpendicular. So I’m like, f*ck. Well, let me check the one that I always use. That’s probably the one that’s open. So I go to the small one and I peel back the curtain and the door’s shut, but I’m just checking the lock. It’s locked… When I’m going to check the lock, I look up and the man is standing right at the door, like, as close as you are to me right now. So, he has a black mask on, a black backpack, all black clothes, and I’m looking at him and I scream, ‘What the f*ck do you want?’ At first, you’re thinking, like, did a neighbor lose his dog? Then I see the mask and I’m like, something’s off and then he advances towards the door, and if it was a burglar, it was a robbery, alarm’s going off, the homeowner’s there, you would run, right? You don’t wanna get caught. So I’m like, well, it can’t be a robbery. So as soon as he advances, I run to grab Mandy to tell her, ‘Holy sh*t, there’s someone in the house.’ We run out the garage door next to Mandy’s bedroom and take off in her car, that was parked behind my car.

The ADT system called the cops automatically, but we also did call the cops. They were there within like three minutes. So, we circled around the neighborhood and then we saw the cop cars come, but they came in lights off, sirens off, quiet. Now, I don’t know where this guy is at the time. The whole time I’m running to Mandy’s room and out the garage door. I’m waiting to get hit over the back of the head with a bat or something. I don’t know what’s happening. Well, what actually happened was when I ran, he already had the other door open, but he had a little blind spot when he had to cross through the curtain. So he thought I ran up the staircase, but I ran behind the staircase to Mandy’s room and out the garage. So when the cops got there two minutes later, he was waiting at the bottom of staircase with a knife in one hand, pepper spray in the other hand, looking up, and they f*cking tackled him and got him out. So, when they asked him, ‘Why were you waiting at the bottom of the staircase?’ His response was, ‘I thought she went up there, and I know she has MMA training, and I didn’t want to get my ass kicked, so I was gonna wait till she came down and pepper spray her.’ So like, this whole thing’s unfolding, I’m still not understanding what’s happening so the cops come up to me and they’re like, ‘What do you do? Who are you?’ Because they didn’t know anything about wrestling. I was like, ‘Oh, I wrestle.’ ‘Do you know this guy? He’s saying he knows you’ and I’m like, ‘No.’ ‘Well, he’s saying he messages you on Instagram.’ So they’re having me look up his name and then I find his messages and it’s like four years worth of, obviously unresponded to, scary DMs, all the way to the extent the last message was that night when he was on my patio and it said, ‘I’m here, babygirl, I’m finally here. Look outside.’ While me and Mandy are watching Bates Motel, he said, ‘Look outside, baby.’ He’s on the screened-in lanai that he cut a hole in and crawled in, watching us through the blinds. So you can’t really see out but you can see in kind of gimmick. He’s watching us through the blinds watch TV. So, yeah, crazy story… So f*cking lucky. One thing happened differently, like, had we slept on the couch? He had the door open, the doors were right behind the couch. We would have both been maced before we could even wake up. Had I not set my alarm that night because I was being lazy and just went to sleep, which I’ve done many nights, we would be dead. Like, one different move in any scenario, we wouldn’t have made it.”

Phillip A. Thomas was sentenced to 15 years in prison as a result.

Deville, real name Daria Berenato, is no longer with WWE. Her contract with the company was not renewed, which concluded a decade-long run as a WWE talent.

If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Insight with Chris Van Vliet with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.