Erin Piacenti was 32, a Bank of America vice president from Chester, New Jersey, and a little more than three weeks past her second wedding anniversary when a stranger pulled two knives from a Target bag in Times Square.
Police say the attack on Monday afternoon was random. It lasted about 20 seconds between the first wound and the second. By nightfall, Piacenti was dead at Bellevue Hospital. So was the woman accused of stabbing her. A 68-year-old man who had just come up from the subway was in stable condition. The Force Investigation Division had an officer-involved shooting on its books.
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What police say happened on Seventh Avenue
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch described an unprovoked double stabbing near West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, just after 4:20 p.m. 911 calls started around 4:24. An eyewitness told officers a woman took two large kitchen knives from a red Target bag, waved them, and went after a 68-year-old man standing with his wife after they left the subway. He was stabbed in the right side of the abdomen.
The attacker kept walking north. Less than half a minute later, on the next stretch of Seventh Avenue toward 42nd Street, she stabbed Piacenti in the abdomen. Police have said there was no known link between the two victims and no sign of a prior argument. Investigators have not called it terrorism.
The 68-year-old has not been named. CBS New York, citing police sources, said he and his wife had been visiting their son in Brooklyn and were on their way home. He remained stable at Bellevue.
The four minutes after that
Officers caught up with the suspect between 42nd and 43rd Streets, near an NYPD substation, still holding both knives. Tisch said they talked to her for about four minutes and ordered her to drop the weapons. She refused.
“I’m not dropping anything. I would rather kill both of you,” Tisch quoted her as saying. Then, again: “I will kill you.”
Stun guns were fired. Police said they did not work. When the woman advanced, two officers opened fire. Video that moved across social media Monday night showed the confrontation in the middle of the tourist crush. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the shooting was captured on body cameras. He thanked officers for “preventing a horrific attack from becoming even worse.”
Tisch called it “an extraordinarily dangerous situation unfolding in the heart of Times Square, the crossroads of the world,” and said the officers “did what we trained them to do.” The department’s Force Investigation Division is handling the shooting, which is standard after police gunfire in New York.
The suspect was identified as Pamela Cisneros, 49, of Queens. One local report placed her on 71st Street in Woodside. Police said she had documented mental-health contacts with the NYPD in 2018 and 2019 and no prior arrests. Both knives were recovered. She was pronounced dead at Bellevue.
A mental-health history is not a motive. Police have not offered one beyond “random and unprovoked.” That phrase is doing a lot of work, and it may be all the public gets for a while.