‘I can almost smell the fire’: Denver man’s 9/11 video brings back a flood of emotions

DENVER, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – Memories of 9/11 take a Denver man to an emotional place.

“Here you can see what a beautiful day that it was, not a cloud in the sky,” Fred Cerbini said.

His footage from Sept. 11, 2001, shows sunshine, on one of America’s darkest days.

“Just jolts me back to this day,” he told Queen City News from his Lincoln County home, reliving the horror on a morning of picture-perfect weather. “How beautiful the day was.”

The video he took with an 8mm camera takes him back.

“I can almost smell the fire as I’m sitting here,” said Cerbini, looking at the video on his iPad.

In 2001, he worked as a technology director for financial company Merrill Lynch in New York City. His nearly 15-minute clip captures the fear and uncertainty.

“ The first one was a plane!” someone said to Cerbini that day.

“What the hell was that just now?” he asked.

“I don’t know someone just said, ‘Here comes another one,’” the man answered.

“It looked to me like a missile or a bomb,” said Cerbini.

“It hurts, it hurts to see it,” he says now.

A year later, he added narration while everything was still fresh in his mind.

The most haunting images are seared in his memory.

“That probably keeps me awake the most,” Cerbini says. “I mean I still think about it pretty much every day. Seeing people having to jump rather than getting burnt to death was a tough one to watch.”

Perhaps the hardest part, it took hours to confirm that his loved ones were safe. On the night of 9/11 he and his family made the decision to move out of New York.

Every Sept. 11, Cerbini stays home to reflect.

“It’s a day of mourning for me, and I just don’t want to be out there. I want to feel what I feel, being by myself and with my wife,” he said.

Amid the sadness, he also saw the best of humanity in the days that followed.

“There’s no nationality, no color, there was nothing that day but people; human beings,” he explained.

“We had one common goal, to be together and it just feels like that’s so far gone, and I need to tell people ‘You’ve got to get back to that,’” said Cerbini.

Decades later, his video still leaves him shock.

“23 years, and it still feels like it was yesterday,” he says.

Every angle is just as agonizing to see now as it was back then.

“The feelings that you had that day stay with you.”

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