Associated Press journalists who witnessed Sept. 11 remember what they
saw, 25 years later
[September 11, 2026]
By JOSEPH FREDERICK, DAVID R. MARTIN and LEAH WILLINGHAM
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.
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A street in New York's lower Manhattan area is littered with debris
after the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center
following terrorist attacks, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Richard Drew
File,)
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.”
He knew his father's voice
AP journalist Jeremy Brown, then 26, was filming near the World
Trade Center when he heard a deep rumble. A firefighter ran toward
him, yelling: “Grab your camera, follow me.”
Brown followed him into the loading dock of 7 World Trade Center as
a huge wave of debris approached. They sheltered in a room as the
building went dark.
“You could feel the heat from the debris. You could smell it,” Brown
said.
When the rumbling stopped, they felt their way through the darkness
until they found an emergency exit. Brown pulled his T-shirt over
his face and began filming.
“Jeremy!” he suddenly heard someone shout. It was his father, who
worked nearby.
“It was just incredible. It was like winning the lottery,” Brown
said.
With no cell service, Brown’s mother didn’t know whether either had
survived. Father and son stayed together that day, his father
carrying Brown's camera bag with extra tapes and batteries.
“As a cameraman that day, I was looking through my viewfinder, and
everything was black and white, and I knew I was recording history,”
Brown said. “But every time I looked up as a human I could see the
devastation, the hurt, and I knew that the world was never going to
be the same.”
Her training took over
Sept. 11 was supposed to be Amy Sancetta’s day off.
The Ohio-based retired AP photographer had stayed in New York after
covering the U.S. Open tennis when her editor called: A small plane
had hit one of the towers. She needed to go downtown.
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. AP journalists Nathan Ellgren
contributed from Washington and Mike Householder contributed from
Cleveland.
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