The last call before Pamela Cisneros entered Times Square: Her brother remains haunted by her final words
The last call before Pamela Cisneros entered Times Square: Her brother remains haunted by her final words.
No one realized that this would be their last conversation with her—moments before the tragedy that claimed the life of Erin Piacenti.
Now, Pamela’s family is struggling to reconcile the woman they once knew with the image of her appearing in Manhattan, wielding two knives.
A history of mental illness, a failed marriage, issues regarding her children, and her recent behavior—these are all pieces of an unsolved puzzle.
Yet, it is her final conversation that leaves everyone speechless.
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**The Last Conversation: Pamela Cisneros Told Her Mother She Was Fine Two Days Before the Times Square Attack**
In the days after the violent events of August 31, 2026, in Times Square, the family of Pamela Cisneros has returned again and again to a single, ordinary telephone call. On the Saturday before the attack, her mother spoke with her. According to her brother, Patrick Peralta, Cisneros said she was fine. That brief assurance of normalcy has become one of the details her relatives find most difficult to reconcile with what unfolded two days later in one of New York City’s busiest public spaces.
Peralta, 59, has described the family’s growing unease in the preceding days. For years Cisneros, then 49 and living in Woodside, Queens, had maintained a consistent routine of visiting her mother and stepfather for meals on most afternoons and on weekends. In the week before the incident she stopped coming. Relatives noticed the absence and began trying to reach her by phone. On Saturday the mother succeeded in speaking with her. Cisneros reported that she was fine. Peralta himself had last seen his sister in person in early August, around August 8 to 10, at a birthday gathering for their stepfather that Cisneros had helped organize. He has described her appearance and demeanor at that gathering as fine and normal.
No more detailed account of the content of the Saturday telephone conversation has been released by the family. There is no public record of extended remarks, warnings, expressions of distress, or any statement beyond the report that she was fine. The exchange, as conveyed by Peralta, was brief and reassuring on its surface. He has said the family saw no clear outward signs that something was seriously wrong in the immediate days before the attack. At the same time he has acknowledged that he does not know what was in his sister’s mind and cannot explain the sudden change that followed.
The broader background Peralta and other relatives have provided places that final ordinary conversation in the context of a long and complicated personal history. Cisneros had faced serious mental health challenges for roughly two decades. According to her brother, the difficulties began after the birth of her second daughter with postpartum depression. He has said he believed the condition later involved bipolar disorder, though he has noted that he does not know the complete clinical diagnosis. She had been hospitalized on multiple occasions, including at Jamaica Hospital and Bellevue. In December 2018 she had a documented mental-health-related encounter with the NYPD after being described as belligerent, intoxicated, and screaming along Lexington Avenue. 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 members said, Cisneros began receiving monthly psychiatric injections because she had difficulty adhering to a daily medication schedule. Peralta has stated that for the previous four to six years, while she received those injections, she appeared stable and showed no aggression or violence toward other people. During that period she lived alone in Woodside, held intermittent employment that included recent work as an administrative assistant for an attorney who specialized in immigration matters, and had earned a master’s degree in psychology. She maintained regular contact with her mother and stepfather until the final week of her life.
Cisneros was the mother of three daughters. One, who is autistic and nonverbal, lives in a group home in Brooklyn and was visited by her mother. The other two daughters live in Florida with their father after the end of Cisneros’s marriage. Court records indicate that divorce proceedings began around 2020 and were finalized more recently. Peralta has said he had the painful 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, 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. 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 maternity leave, near West 42nd Street. Officers located Cisneros near an NYPD substation in the area 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, stating that 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 taken to Bellevue Hospital and pronounced dead.
Peralta has said the entire family feels deep sorrow for the two people who were stabbed—one who died and one who was injured. He has also said the family cannot understand what happened and has described the change in his sister as sudden, “like a switch.” Cisneros’s mother, in a separate interview, questioned why the officers present had not physically restrained her daughter by grabbing her arm. Her father, Mario Cisneros, has stated that he cannot comprehend his daughter’s actions and has asked forgiveness from the victims’ families, saying he is suffering as they are suffering.
The Saturday telephone conversation in which Cisneros told her mother she was fine remains the last reported direct contact between her and her immediate family before the events in Times Square. Relatives have presented that exchange as evidence that, from their vantage point, nothing appeared critically amiss only two days earlier. Peralta has noted that she had stopped her usual visits in the preceding week, which prompted the calls, but the content of the successful contact on Saturday was reassuring. The family has not described any other conversations in the final days that altered that impression.
Erin Piacenti’s family has released its own statement describing devastation at 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. The couple had recently celebrated their second wedding anniversary and had 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. A Taser expert has publicly discussed possible reasons the less-lethal devices failed to stop Cisneros, including body composition, a probe that struck her handbag, distance, and continuous movement. Those technical factors form part of the public discussion but do not alter the sequence of events established by police: commands, refusal, threats, advance while armed, failed Tasers, and then gunfire.
For Cisneros’s family, the ordinary Saturday telephone call continues to stand as a fixed point of reference. A woman who had lived with serious mental health challenges for decades, who had found periods of stability through treatment, who had maintained family contact and recent employment, and who told her mother she was fine two days before the attack became, on a Monday afternoon in Times Square, the person who carried out random stabbings and then confronted officers while armed. Relatives have said they do not know what changed in the intervening hours. They have expressed sorrow for the victims while continuing to struggle with the gap between the sister, daughter, and mother they knew and the figure who appeared in the videos and news reports.
The public record of that final conversation is limited to the account provided by Patrick Peralta: the mother spoke with her on Saturday, and Cisneros said she was fine. No additional details of the exchange have been made public. That simple report of normalcy, set against the violence that followed so soon afterward, remains one of the elements the family returns to most often as they attempt to understand an event they still describe as inexplicable. The formal investigations continue, and further information may yet emerge from body-camera footage and official reviews. For now, the last known words Cisneros shared with her family before entering Times Square are the ones her brother has repeated: she said she was fine.
