Brother’s Chilling Realization: The Last Time He Saw His Sister Alive Was at a Family Birthday — Until the Horrifying Times Square Photos Flashed on His TV
Patrick Peralta last saw his sister Pamela Cisneros face-to-face in early August. The occasion was their stepfather’s birthday celebration. At the time, nothing appeared dramatically wrong. Cisneros, then 49, a mother of three and a Queens resident with a master’s degree in psychology, seemed to be managing the mental health challenges she had carried for decades.
Peralta, 59, later described that final in-person meeting as ordinary. Cisneros had helped organize the gathering. She had found relative stability in recent years through monthly medication injections after earlier crises that included postpartum depression and a 2019 suicide attempt in which she threw herself onto subway tracks. Family members said she had shown no history of violence toward others. She lived in Woodside, worked intermittently with an immigration attorney, and regularly visited her mother.
That sense of normalcy shattered on the evening of August 31, 2026. Peralta was watching news coverage of a random stabbing attack in the heart of Times Square. At first he dismissed the chaos as “typical New York.” Then clearer photographs of the confrontation appeared on screen. Recognition hit hard. The woman clutching two kitchen knives, advancing on police after stabbing two strangers, was his sister.
According to authorities, the attack unfolded in seconds near West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue around 4:24 p.m. Cisneros pulled the knives from a red Target bag and stabbed 68-year-old Tak Kam of Rhode Island in the abdomen as he waited to cross the street with his wife after exiting the subway. Moments later, about a block away, she fatally stabbed 32-year-old Erin Piacenti, a Bank of America vice president and new mother from New Jersey, in the abdomen. Piacenti died at Bellevue Hospital. Kam survived and was listed in stable condition.
Police confronted Cisneros near an NYPD substation on West 43rd Street. Officers ordered her repeatedly to drop the weapons. She refused, advancing while holding a knife in each hand and making threats. Tasers proved ineffective. Two officers fired, striking her. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Peralta has said the family remains numb and searching for answers. Cisneros had told her mother she was “fine” as recently as the previous Saturday. She had stopped her usual visits to her mother’s home in the days before the attack, prompting concern and phone calls. Her father recalled that she had begun attending mental-health appointments independently earlier in the year and had reassured him not to worry.
Cisneros had a documented history of mental-health encounters with police in 2018 and 2019 but no prior arrests. Relatives described a long struggle that included possible bipolar disorder, yet they insist she had never displayed aggression toward others before that Monday afternoon. The sudden shift left them devastated for the victims and their own family.
The New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation has opened a review of the police shooting, as required in cases of civilian deaths involving officers. The episode has once again focused attention on the challenges of managing serious mental illness in a dense urban environment and the speed with which a person can move from apparent stability to irreversible violence.
For Peralta, the gap between the ordinary August birthday gathering and the televised images of the Times Square confrontation remains almost impossible to bridge. The last time he looked his sister in the eye, she was simply a family member at a celebration. The next time he saw her face, it was on the news, frozen in the final moments of a tragedy that claimed one life, injured another, and ended her own.
