The change her family didn’t see coming: Pamela Cisneros was not only suffering from postpartum depression—her condition was worsening
The change her family didn’t see coming: Pamela Cisneros was not only suffering from postpartum depression—her condition was worsening.
Her father even thought his daughter was “back on the right track.”
However, the family later noticed changes in Pamela’s behavior leading up to the Times Square incident.
No one imagined those changes could lead to something so horrific.
Then, Erin Piacenti crossed her path.
Now, the history of Pamela Cisneros’s marriages sends shivers down everyone’s spine.
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Pamela Cisneros’s father believed his daughter had finally turned a corner. After a suicide attempt in 2019, Mario Cisneros began taking her to monthly hospital appointments where she received psychiatric injections that appeared to stabilize her condition. For several years, according to family members, the treatment worked. She lived quietly in Woodside, Queens, held intermittent employment, maintained regular contact with her mother and stepfather, and showed no signs of the violence that would later unfold. Then, in the months and weeks leading up to August 31, 2026, subtle changes began to appear. No one in the family, they have said repeatedly, imagined those changes could culminate in the random stabbings in Times Square that left one person dead, another seriously injured, and Cisneros herself fatally shot by police.
Mario Cisneros, 78, spoke publicly in the days after the incident with a mixture of incomprehension and sorrow. “I knew my daughter very well but I didn’t know what was going on with her,” he said. “What I do know is she was getting injections.” He recalled that in recent months she had expressed a desire not to depend on the medication to feel normal. “She didn’t want to continue them,” he said. “She was fighting to not be on the medicine, to not have to depend on it.” In April 2026 she declined a ride to her regular mental health appointment at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, telling him she could go alone. “No, Dad, don’t worry,” he remembered her saying. “I’m good. Don’t worry about me.” About ten days before the attack he had seen her for dinner and noticed nothing amiss. “She was a noble and polite girl, a Christian. But all of a sudden she acted like an animal,” he said. “What she did just doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t fit.” He added that he was sorry, as her father, and that nobody should take a life.
Her brother, Patrick Peralta, 59, provided a detailed parallel account that has formed the core of the family’s public narrative. He said Cisneros’s mental health difficulties began roughly two decades earlier, after the birth of her second daughter, when she experienced postpartum depression. He believed the condition later involved bipolar disorder, though he acknowledged he did not know the complete clinical diagnosis. She had been hospitalized multiple times over the years, including stays at Jamaica Hospital and Bellevue. In December 2018 she had a documented mental-health-related encounter with the NYPD after officers found her belligerent, intoxicated, and screaming along Lexington Avenue in Midtown. In March 2019 she attempted suicide by jumping onto the tracks of the E train at the Union Turnpike station in Queens.
After the 2019 crisis, family intervention led to the monthly injection regimen. Peralta stated that for the previous four to six years, while she received the injections, she appeared stable and never displayed aggression or violence toward other people. “As long as she got the medication, she was fine,” he said. “She never showed any violence towards anybody.” During that period she lived alone in an apartment in Woodside, worked intermittently—including recent employment as an administrative assistant for an attorney specializing in immigration cases—and had earned a master’s degree in psychology. She regularly visited her mother and stepfather for meals on most afternoons and weekends.
In the week before the attack, that routine broke. Cisneros stopped coming to the family meals. Relatives noticed and began calling her. On Saturday, two days before the incident, her mother succeeded in speaking with her by telephone. According to Peralta, Cisneros said she was fine. Peralta himself had last seen her in person in early August, around August 8 to 10, at a birthday gathering for their stepfather that she had helped organize. He described her then as fine and normal. The family has speculated that she may have missed recent injections after she began administering them herself rather than receiving them in a clinical setting. “That’s the only thing I can suggest,” Peralta said, “that maybe she didn’t get the last couple of months of injections. Her brain was going all over.”
Court records fill in the picture of her marital history. Cisneros married Jose Lopez in September 1999. The couple had three children together. They later lived for a period in Florida. By 2018 they had separated, and Cisneros had returned to Queens. Lopez filed for divorce in Hillsborough County, Florida, in 2020. The case, which included custody proceedings involving their youngest daughter, was finalized in 2025. Two of the daughters live with their father in Florida. The third, who is autistic and nonverbal, lives in a group home in Brooklyn and was visited regularly by Cisneros. There is no public record of any additional marriages. Peralta has said he had the difficult task of informing the two daughters in Florida of their mother’s death by telephone in the days after the incident.
On the afternoon of Monday, August 31, 2026, according to official police accounts, Cisneros pulled two kitchen knives from a red Target shopping bag near West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue at approximately 4:24 p.m. She stabbed a 68-year-old man from Rhode Island in the abdomen. Roughly twenty seconds later she moved north and fatally stabbed 32-year-old Erin Piacenti, a Bank of America vice president who was on her first day back at work after five months of maternity leave, near West 42nd Street. Officers located Cisneros near an NYPD substation in the vicinity of West 43rd Street. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated that officers spent about four minutes engaging her in dialogue and issuing repeated commands to drop the knives. Cisneros refused, saying she would rather kill the officers and repeating that she would kill them. She waved the knives and advanced. Multiple officers deployed Tasers, which proved ineffective. Two officers then fired their service weapons. Cisneros was transported to Bellevue Hospital and pronounced dead.
A Taser expert later discussed possible reasons the less-lethal devices failed, including body composition, a probe that struck her handbag, distance between the officers and the subject, and continuous movement. Those technical factors form part of the public discussion of the final confrontation but do not alter the sequence established by police: commands, refusal, threats, advance while armed, failed Tasers, and then the use of firearms.
Family members have expressed deep sorrow for the two people who were stabbed. Peralta has said the entire family feels sorry for the victim who died and the one who was injured. At the same time they have insisted that they never knew Cisneros to be violent toward others before that afternoon. Her mother, in a separate interview, questioned why the officers present had not physically restrained her daughter by grabbing her arm. The father’s belief that she had turned a corner after 2019, the brother’s description of years of stability under treatment, the mother’s final telephone conversation in which Cisneros reported feeling fine, and the recent behavioral shifts—the stopped visits, the declined offer of transportation to an appointment, the expressed reluctance to remain dependent on medication—constitute the documented observations the family has shared.
Erin Piacenti’s family released its own statement in the days after the attack. Relatives described themselves as devastated by the loss of a 32-year-old wife, new mother, daughter, sister, and friend. Piacenti and her husband, Frank, had welcomed their daughter Madison five months earlier. Becoming a mother, they said, had been Erin’s lifelong ambition, and Madison had given her the greatest possible joy. The couple had celebrated their second wedding anniversary that summer and had recently returned from a family road trip. They were preparing to build a life together with their new daughter when that life changed incomprehensibly in an instant. A GoFundMe was established to support Madison’s future.
The investigations into the stabbings and the officer-involved shooting remain open under the NYPD Force Investigation Division and the New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation. Body-worn camera footage from the confrontation is expected to be released as part of the standard review process. No official finding has determined whether missed medication, a deterioration in her mental health, or any other specific factor precipitated the events of August 31. The public record consists of the family’s contemporaneous statements, the police timeline, the court records of the divorce, and the accounts of neighbors who described Cisneros as a quiet tenant and, in one case, an “excellent woman” known since birth.
The gap between the woman her father believed was back on the right track and the person who appeared in Times Square that Monday afternoon remains the central unresolved element in the family’s narrative. They have described years of treatment and apparent stability, followed by small changes that did not, in their view, signal the violence that followed. They have expressed sorrow for the victims while continuing to search for an explanation that still eludes them. The formal investigations continue, and further information may yet emerge. For now, the documented sequence—the long history of mental health challenges beginning with postpartum depression, the period of stability under monthly injections, the father’s belief that she had turned a corner, the recent shifts in behavior and attitude toward medication, the final ordinary telephone call in which she said she was fine, and the sudden violence two days later—stands as the factual outline of the change her family did not see coming.
