Associated Press journalists who witnessed Sept. 11 remember what they saw, 25 years later

NEW YORK (AP) — Karen Matthews was getting her 3-year-old daughter ready for preschool in her Manhattan apartment on Sept. 11, 2001, when she heard a loud boom, unlike anything she’d ever heard before.

Holding her child, she went outside. Around her, people stared up at a gash in the north tower of the World Trade Center, smoke billowing from the building just blocks from her home.

“What did you see? What did you see?” people were asking one another. Matthews, an Associated Press reporter, began asking the same question, fumbling to get out her notebook and record what people had witnessed, all with her daughter still in her arms.

Matthews had planned to drop her daughter at school before working later to cover New York’s primary election. Instead, she and other AP journalists found themselves documenting the Sept. 11 attacks as they lived through them.

Twenty-five years later, they remember what they saw.

At first, no one knew what was happening

On her way outside, Matthews passed a woman in her building’s lobby with tears streaming down her face. Some people assumed a small plane had accidentally struck the tower.

Then she saw a “big fireball” erupt from the south tower as a second hijacked jet struck.

“‘I want to go to school, I want to go to school,’” her daughter started crying.

“That’s when we all knew that we were under attack,” Matthews said.

Matthews started toward the preschool anyway, until she saw teachers grabbing children and running north, many of them crying. She took her daughter upstairs, intent on getting her to a safe place, and put on Barney.

Then she heard two more impossibly loud roars — one tower collapsing, then the other. Nearly 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and on the four jets hijacked by al-Qaida militants.

Twenty-five years later, Matthews, now retired, still divides her life into before Sept. 11 and after.

“I’m not a really fearful person,” she said. “But you lose a sense of security when something like that happens.”

“I do think it helped to be part of telling the story of what happened,” Matthews said.

The camera becomes a wall

Lower Manhattan’s streets were filled with smoke and debris when Richard Drew got off the subway at Chambers Street and saw the burning twin towers.

His assignment that day had originally been to cover the opening day of Fashion Week — a whirlwind of glamour, models and runway shows.

He began taking pictures. Gray ash and soot covered his clothes, face and cameras.

An emergency medical worker pointed up and said, “Look at that.” People were plummeting from the burning towers.

“I don’t know whether they were jumping or they got forced out by the fire,” Drew said.

Drew photographed them. One image became known as “The Falling Man.” It shows a lone man falling headfirst, his body nearly aligned with the vertical lines of the towers. The photograph appeared in some newspapers the next day, but was rejected by other publications that worried readers would find it too upsetting.

Drew still thinks about the photograph — and the unidentified man in it— at least once a week.

“When I’m in a situation like September 11th, I go into professional photographer mode and I concentrate on whatever’s happening in front of me,” said Drew, who also photographed the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

He said his wife calls his camera a wall — a filter between the photographer and the reality they’re capturing.

“I guess I’m in denial about whether those things really affected me,” he said.

The wheelchairs stayed empty

Dust from the pulverized towers was falling “like a snowstorm” when AP reporter Larry Neumeister made it to a hospital near ground zero that afternoon.

Doctors and nurses gathered outside. Lines of wheelchairs and gurneys waited at the entrance. Staff were preparing for a constant stream of injured survivors — potentially thousands, Neumeister said.

Then the hours passed.

“It became clear nobody else was being brought in,” Neumeister said.

Around midnight, Neumeister walked by the World Trade Center site. A doctor told him: “You either walked away from the site or ran away from the World Trade Center buildings when they fell, or you were gone. There was no in-between.”

Her training took over

Sept. 11 was supposed to be Amy Sancetta’s day off.

Then based in Ohio, the AP photographer had traveled to New York to cover U.S. Open tennis. But the tournament was over and she had the day to herself. Then her editor called: A small plane had hit one of the towers. She needed to go downtown.

As she gathered her gear, Sancetta realized she didn’t know where the twin towers were. She got into a cab and told the driver to get her as close as he could.

About a block and a half away, Sancetta was photographing the south tower when it began to collapse.

“The weirdest thing that went through my head at the time was, it was kind of muscle memory, like shooting a basketball game,” she said.

When the cloud of debris came toward her, Sancetta ran into a parking garage. In a stairwell, she found a woman crying who had escaped from the towers and wanted to call her son. Sancetta hugged her and reached for her flip phone. Her hand was shaking. There was no signal. Sancetta took the son’s number and promised to call him.

When she emerged onto the street, everything was white, “like covered with snow, but not snow.” The screaming and pounding footsteps had given way to crying and whimpering. Loose-leaf office paper floated through the sky “like birds.”

“I wish I’d shot that,” Sancetta said. “I didn’t, but I can see it — I see it right now.”

Twenty-five years later, Sancetta held up a newspaper from Sept. 12 showing the burning towers she had photographed.

“NIGHTMARE,” the headline read.

Outside her windows now are woods. But she can still remember the sound of the tower collapsing — “just unearthly.”

“As a journalist, I’m glad I was there,” Sancetta said. “But as a human being, I wish I’d gone home on Monday.”

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Willingham reported from Boston.