Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, friends and family members of the victims gathered at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan on Friday (September 11) to remember their loved ones.
Many carried photographs as they joined Vice President JD Vance and four former U.S. presidents for a ceremony commemorating the nearly 3,000 people killed when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
READ: New York marks 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks
"This is where I have to be on September 11," said John Quinn of Brooklyn, whose friend Joyce Carpeneto worked on the North Tower's 83rd floor. He said he had attended all 24 previous anniversary commemorations.
Quinn said he was home watching television when the attacks unfolded. He had been due at work for a music distributor in Midtown Manhattan, but his boss told him to stay where he was.
Family members and friends began gathering as early as 7 a.m., ahead of the ceremony's opening moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. EDT (1246 GMT), the time the first plane struck the North Tower.
Rob Nelson, 77, flew from Portland, Oregon, to join his brother Ed Nelson, 79, of Long Island. They came to honor their cousin, a World Trade Center worker who died while helping people escape the building.
"We are just here to be grateful and to pay respect to all the first responders who did what they did," Nelson said.
"It was a terrible, terrible day, and 25 years seems like a blink of an eye."
At the ceremony, victims' relatives read aloud the names of the 2,977 people killed in the September 11 attacks and the six killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Some readers were children who had never met the relatives they lost in 2001.
Other moments of silence marked when the remaining three planes crashed and the two towers collapsed. For the first time, a seventh moment of silence was scheduled to honor the thousands who have died from illnesses linked to exposure to toxic dust after the attacks.
Franklin Anchahua Herrera, 55, an immigrant from Peru who helped clean up the area around Ground Zero, also stood outside the memorial. He said he came to remember fellow cleanup workers who had since died from illnesses he attributed to toxic exposure.
Anchahua Herrera arrived in the United States a year before the attacks. After losing his job as a painter, he volunteered to help with the cleanup.
"Unfortunately, my health has deteriorated over the years because, at the time, we didn't know what the consequences would be," he said.
"The contractors gave us paper masks, which weren't sufficient for the work we had to do."
(Camera by: Hussein al Waaile, Production and writing by: Claudia Alizo, Editing by: Dan Fastenberg)