The first time Patrick Peralta understood that the woman on the television screen might actually be his sister, his mind refused to accept it.
There had been another violent incident in New York City. Another collection of flashing police lights, frightened witnesses and cellphone videos spreading across television and social media. Patrick had seen stories like it before. Most people in a city of millions have.
At first, there was no reason for him to believe this one belonged to his family.
Then clearer images began appearing.
He looked again.
And suddenly, the stranger in the footage was no longer a stranger.
It was Pamela.
His sister.
The 49-year-old woman police say had walked into the heart of Times Square carrying two knives, stabbed two people apparently at random, killed 32-year-old new mother Erin Piacenti, and then died after being shot by police when authorities say she refused repeated commands to put the weapons down and advanced toward officers. (apnews.com)
Patrick was left with a question that would haunt both families for entirely different reasons.
How could the sister he knew have done this?
When reporters eventually asked him to describe Pamela, Patrick answered with four words that seemed impossible to reconcile with the images the country had just watched:
“She was never aggressive.” (ibtimes.co.uk)
It wasn’t an excuse.
It couldn’t undo what happened.
And Patrick himself expressed sympathy for Erin’s devastated family.
But those words opened another chapter in a tragedy that had already taken two lives and permanently changed countless others.
Because behind the woman America saw holding knives in Times Square was a family saying they had known someone very different.
And behind the victim was a five-month-old baby who would now grow up without her mother.
Twenty Seconds in Times Square
It happened with frightening speed.
On the afternoon of August 31, Times Square was doing what Times Square always does.
People were going home from work.
Tourists were taking photographs.
Cars moved slowly through Manhattan traffic.
Screens flashed advertisements above sidewalks crowded with strangers whose lives had nothing to do with one another.
Among them was a 68-year-old man from Rhode Island.
He had been visiting his son in Brooklyn and was traveling with his wife. According to police, he had never met Pamela Cisneros.
There had been no argument between them.
No confrontation.
No history.
Then Pamela allegedly pulled two knives from a shopping bag and stabbed him in the abdomen.
He survived.
Approximately twenty seconds later, police say Pamela encountered another stranger.
Erin Piacenti.
She was 32.
Pamela allegedly stabbed her too. (ndtv.com)
Twenty seconds.
That was roughly all the time separating the two attacks.
Erin was rushed to Bellevue Hospital.
Doctors could not save her.
The other victim remained hospitalized in stable condition after the attack. (cbsnews.com)
And the terrible irony was that Erin’s life outside that street had only recently entered one of its happiest chapters.
She had become a mother five months earlier.
Erin Was Going Home to Her Baby
Erin wasn’t a tourist wandering through Times Square.
She was finishing her day.
She worked as a vice president at Bank of America and had built an impressive life before reaching 32. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and later earned her law degree from Fordham University School of Law in 2021.
Her husband, Frank Piacenti, graduated from Fordham Law the same year. (cbsnews.com)
They married.
They built a home in New Jersey.
Then came the child Erin had dreamed of having.
Madison.
Their daughter was born only five months before Erin died.
Erin had spent those months on maternity leave, learning the intimate routines of new motherhood and traveling with her little family. Only days before the attack, she had shared photographs reflecting on that precious period — including her daughter’s baptism and trips the family had taken together. (ndtv.com)
August 31 marked her return to work.
Her first day back.
That afternoon, she was supposed to finish work and return to the life waiting for her at home.
Instead, her name became national news.
Bank of America described Erin as a valued colleague and said the company was shocked and deeply saddened by her death. Fordham remembered both Erin and Frank as cherished members of its law-school community. (cbsnews.com)
But titles could describe only a fraction of what had been lost.
Vice president.
Law-school graduate.
Wife.
Those things mattered.
Yet one word made the tragedy almost impossible to comprehend.
Mother.
Then Police Saw the Knives
After the stabbings, police confronted Pamela.
Video from the scene captured an increasingly tense encounter.
According to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, officers spent approximately four minutes ordering Pamela to put down the two knives.
She refused.
Police said she threatened the officers.
Tasers were deployed but failed to stop her.
Authorities say Pamela then continued advancing while armed, and two officers opened fire.
She was transported to Bellevue Hospital.
The same hospital where Erin had been taken.
Pamela died there too. (fox5ny.com)
By the end of the afternoon, two women who had never known one another were dead.
One was 32.
One was 49.
One left behind a five-month-old daughter.
The other left behind a family trying to understand how the woman they knew had become the person seen in those final minutes.
Patrick Saw His Sister on the News
Patrick Peralta was 59 when the call nobody actually made arrived through a television screen.
He had not been standing in Times Square.
He hadn’t witnessed the attack.
He learned about it the way strangers did.
Through the news.
At first, he apparently dismissed what he was seeing as another troubling New York incident.
Then he recognized Pamela.
The realization was almost impossible to process.
Because the behavior described by police didn’t match the sister Patrick remembered.
“She was never aggressive,” he later said. (ibtimes.co.uk)
FOX 5 New York reported him making a similar statement:
“She’s never been violent.” (fox5ny.com)
Those words didn’t challenge what police said happened.
They revealed Patrick’s confusion about it.
The sister in his memories and the woman in Times Square seemed like two different people.
And Patrick wasn’t the only relative saying so.
Their father was struggling with the same contradiction.
A Father Who Could Not Understand
Mario Cisneros was 78.
Pamela was his daughter.
He knew she had struggled for years.
But he also remembered another Pamela.
A polite daughter.
A woman he described as noble.
A Christian.
Someone whose behavior in Times Square seemed utterly incompatible with the person he thought he understood. (monorepo-sample1.nyt.net)
Mario did not defend the killing.
Quite the opposite.
Speaking after the attack, he apologized to Erin’s family.
“I am sorry for what my daughter did,” he said, explaining that he too was suffering. (cbsnews.com)
He was grieving his daughter while simultaneously confronting the knowledge that another family was grieving because of what police say she had done.
There is no comfortable place inside that kind of grief.
How does a parent mourn a child while knowing another parent has lost a child because of her?
How does a brother remember the sister he loved while looking at footage he cannot explain?
Mario’s words reflected that impossible contradiction.
What Pamela had done, he said, simply did not make sense to him.
“It just doesn’t fit.” (monorepo-sample1.nyt.net)
The Pamela Her Family Remembered
Before Times Square, Pamela’s life appeared almost invisible to the wider world.
She lived alone in Woodside, Queens.
Her building manager later described a quiet tenant who paid her rent on time and caused no problems. He remembered little more than polite greetings. (monorepo-sample1.nyt.net)
She was a mother of three.
She had studied psychology, and her brother said she held a master’s degree in the field.
She had also worked intermittently in a law office specializing in immigration matters. (ibtimes.co.uk)
There were family dinners.
Visits with her mother and stepfather.
A birthday gathering in early August that Pamela reportedly helped organize.
Patrick was there.
It would be the last time he saw his sister before seeing her again in news footage. (ibtimes.co.uk)
Nothing at that gathering had apparently warned him about what would happen weeks later.
That memory now carried a different weight.
When someone does something incomprehensible, families often return obsessively to the last ordinary encounter.
Was there something in her voice?
Something in her expression?
Something we missed?
Patrick searched those memories.
He couldn’t find the warning.
“There Was No Sign Something Was Wrong”
In the days before the attack, however, one pattern did change.
Pamela frequently visited her mother.
Then she stopped coming.
The family noticed.
They called.
Her mother eventually spoke with Pamela on the Saturday before the Times Square attack.
Pamela said she was fine.
“There was no sign something was wrong,” Patrick later recalled. (hindustantimes.com)
Two days later, everything changed.
In hindsight, missed dinners can look like warnings.
At the time, they can look like life.
People get busy.
Plans change.
Someone says they’re fine, and we believe them because most of the time “I’m fine” means exactly that.
Patrick had no way of knowing what Monday would bring.
Neither did Erin.
A Long History Her Family Had Tried to Manage
Pamela’s family has spoken publicly about her history of serious mental-health difficulties, while authorities have confirmed documented mental-health-related encounters with police in 2018 and 2019. She had no NYPD arrest record. (apnews.com)
Her father told The New York Times that a severe crisis in 2019 prompted the family to become more involved in her care.
Afterward, he began taking her to monthly hospital appointments where she received injections that he believed helped stabilize her.
For several years, Patrick said, she appeared to be doing much better.
“She was doing well,” he recalled.
He again emphasized the detail he couldn’t reconcile with what happened later:
“She was never aggressive.” (ibtimes.co.uk)
Her father remembered that in April, Pamela declined his offer to drive her to an appointment, saying she could manage on her own.
“Don’t worry about me,” she told him. (monorepo-sample1.nyt.net)
Five months later, those words must have sounded very different.
Her relatives have raised questions about whether she remained in treatment, but public reporting has not definitively established her treatment status immediately before the attack. (monorepo-sample1.nyt.net)
And one distinction matters enormously:
An explanation is not an excuse.
Whatever contributed to Pamela’s deterioration cannot change what happened to Erin.
A five-month-old baby still lost her mother.
Patrick’s Words About Erin’s Family
Perhaps the most important part of Patrick’s interview came when he stopped talking about Pamela.
He spoke about Erin.
Or rather, about the people Erin left behind.
Patrick knew there was nothing his family could say that would reverse what had happened.
No description of Pamela’s past could return Erin to Frank.
No explanation could put Madison back into her mother’s arms.
“Nothing that we can say is going to bring the person back,” Patrick said.
Then he added:
“We feel their pain, too.” (ibtimes.co.uk)
It was an acknowledgment of the moral center of the tragedy.
Whatever questions Pamela’s family had about what happened to her, Erin was the innocent person whose life had been taken.
She had done nothing to cause the encounter.
Police described the attack as random and unprovoked. (apnews.com)
She happened to be walking through the wrong few feet of Manhattan during the wrong few seconds.
Two Families Went Home Different
That may be the most haunting part of the story.
Two families began August 31 with no connection whatsoever.
The Piacentis didn’t know the Cisneros family.
The Cisneros family didn’t know Erin.
Their lives occupied completely separate worlds.
Then came twenty seconds in Times Square.
Now each family will forever appear in the other’s story.
For Erin’s loved ones, Pamela will be the stranger whose actions took away a daughter, wife and mother.
For Pamela’s family, Erin will be the innocent woman whose death makes their grief inseparable from guilt, sorrow and questions they may never answer.
But the losses are not equivalent.
Erin was attacked without provocation.
Her baby lost a mother because of an act she had no part in creating.
That remains at the heart of what happened.
The Little Girl at the End of the Story
Eventually, investigations conclude.
Headlines disappear.
Videos stop circulating.
People who followed every development return to their own lives.
But Madison’s life will still be beginning.
She is only five months old.
She cannot understand why her mother isn’t coming home.
She cannot understand Times Square.
She cannot understand why strangers know her mother’s name.
Years from now, she will.
She will see photographs.
She will hear stories.
She will learn that Erin had spent the first five months of her life almost entirely devoted to being her mother.
She will learn about the trips they took together.
Her baptism.
The photographs.
The way Erin smiled while holding her.
And she will learn that August 31 was supposed to be simply another transition in their family’s life.
Mom was going back to work.
Then Mom would come home.
Except she didn’t.
“She Was Never Aggressive”
For Patrick, the four words remain a description of the sister he remembers.
She was never aggressive.
They cannot describe what happened in Times Square.
The evidence of that afternoon tells another story.
But perhaps Patrick wasn’t trying to explain the woman holding two knives.
Perhaps he was trying to explain why her own family couldn’t recognize her in that woman.
His memories were of birthdays and family meals.
The country saw the final minutes.
Both now belong to Pamela’s story.
But another story must remain larger.
Erin’s.
She was 32 years old.
A lawyer.
A Bank of America vice president.
A wife.
A daughter.
A friend.
And for five precious months, the role she had reportedly dreamed of most:
A mother.
Pamela’s family may spend years asking what happened to the woman they thought they knew.
Erin’s family faces an entirely different question.
How do you explain to a little girl that the mother who adored her disappeared because of a stranger she had never met?
There may never be words adequate for either question.
There are only the lives before Times Square.
And everything that came after.
For more on the tragic story of Erin Piacenti, discover how four days after she was killed in Times Square, her family made one tearful request. And for another heartbreaking loss, read about how Carla Jeffery died at 33, leaving behind a life far bigger than the screen.
