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?” people were asking one another. Matthews, an 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. 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. 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.
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