‘Disruptor’ anguish
9/11 kin arrested
Every Sept. 11, Alicia Ceballos would wait for a special moment that happened at the World Trade Center site, 2,500 miles away from her home in Colombia.
“I watched the ceremony on television every year waiting for my father’s name to be read,” said Ceballos, 37, a dancer whose father, Juan Armando Ceballos Rivera, was killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Ceballos long planned to be in Manhattan in 2021. She brought a small speaker to play his favorite Andean music from his native Chile.
“I wanted to play the music as they read his name,” Ceballos told The Post in Spanish.
She did not get the chance. Instead, she was hauled out of the memorial by cops and taken for a psychiatric evaluation.
She wore a homemade T-shirt with her father’s name that read, “9/11 They Should Be Alive Truth and Justice.”
“I have watched a lot of documentaries and read a lot about that day, but I’m not a conspiracy theorist. My purpose was to honor my father,” she said.
Ceballos, who was born in the US, said the trouble at the ceremony started when, to ease her stress, she lit a cigarette. She said a cop told her to move to a back area near reporters where she started to dance.
“This was the way I wanted to express my terrible grief and I started to do a little dance to honor my father,” she said.
Then a cop grabbed her arm and said, “Get out of here!” she recounted.
“I told him that I was the daughter of a victim. They started to grab me and I fought back,” she said. “With all my strength, I resisted.”
Ceballos was taken to Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and released. By the time she returned to the ceremony, her father’s name had already been read.
“They treated me like a criminal,” she said.
PA spokesperson Amber Greene said, “Port Authority police responded to the individual’s exhibited behavior, which was causing a disturbance.”