Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, current and former Associated Press journalists who witnessed the events recall what they saw. Karen Matthews, an AP reporter, was getting her 3-year-old daughter ready for preschool in her Manhattan apartment when she heard a loud boom. She went outside and saw a gash in the north tower of the World Trade Center, with smoke billowing from the building. People were asking each other, "What did you see?" Matthews began asking the same question, trying to record what people had witnessed while holding her daughter. She had planned to drop her daughter at school before working on New York’s primary election, but instead found herself documenting the attacks as they unfolded. On her way outside, she passed a woman in her building’s lobby with tears streaming down her face. Some people initially 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. Her daughter started crying, "I want to go to school, I want to go to school," and that’s when they all knew they were under attack. Matthews started toward the preschool, but saw teachers grabbing children and running north, many of them crying. She took her daughter upstairs and put on Barney. Then she heard two more impossibly loud roars — one tower collapsing, then the other. Richard Drew, an AP photographer, was covering the opening day of Fashion Week when he saw the burning twin towers. He began taking pictures as 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. Drew photographed them, and one image became known as "The Falling Man," showing a lone man falling headfirst. 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. He said his wife calls his camera a wall — a filter between the photographer and the reality they’re capturing. Larry Neumeister, an AP reporter, arrived at a hospital near ground zero and saw dust from the towers falling "like a snowstorm." Doctors and nurses gathered outside, with lines of wheelchairs and gurneys waiting at the entrance. Staff were preparing for a constant stream of injured survivors, but as the hours passed, it became clear nobody else was being brought in. 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." Amy Sancetta, an AP photographer based in Ohio, had traveled to New York to cover the U.S. Open tennis tournament. After the tournament ended, she had the day to herself until her editor called and told her a small plane had hit one of the towers. She needed to go downtown. As she gathered her gear, she 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. She said the weirdest thing that went through her mind at the time was, "it was kind of muscle memory, like shooting a basketball game." 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." Sancetta said she wished she had shot that moment. Twenty-five years later, she held up a newspaper from Sept. 12 showing the burning towers she had photographed. "NIGHTMARE," the headline read.