Home Of Bengals Coach Destroyed

April 10, 1999 / 8:22 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Al Roberts, the Cincinnati Bengals' special teams coach, was thrown across his bedroom and had his house destroyed by the tornado that touched down in the city's northern suburbs Friday morning.

Roberts and his wife, Arvella, were asleep in their home in Montgomery when the tornado hit around 5 a.m. Four people were killed and hundreds of homes were damaged.

Roberts said he and his wife were lifted and thrown about five feet when the tornado hit their house. He remembers landing and looking towards where the ceiling should have been.

"I'm looking up at black sky," Roberts said. "The whole roof is gone. Rain is coming down. I have to put my clothes on. I put my shirt on after there was some lightning and I saw it on the floor."

The couple walked around debris on their shaky stairs and headed for the front door, which Arvella Roberts couldn't open.

"I said, `Sweetheart, you don't have to worry about it. We can walk out the living room because there's no walls,"' Roberts said.

The upper floor to the Roberts' home was stripped away, as was most of the lower floor.

"Understand, there's nothing left," he said. "The living room, dining room, kitchen -- gone. Upstairs there's (supposed to be) three bedrooms, a hallway, a bathroom. Nothing. If you saw the house, you wouldn't know how we got out of there."