First, her marriage fell apart. Then, her mind collapsed. Her brother has just revealed the final reason behind his sister’s uncontrolled actions in Times Square
Pamela Cisneros held a master’s degree in psychology. She was a mother of three. On paper, she understood the language of crisis better than most. That is why her brother’s account of her final years lands with such force: the collapse of her marriage came first, and the collapse of her daily life followed.
Family members now describe a long illness that began after the birth of her second daughter more than two decades ago. They speak of postpartum depression that never fully receded and of a later diagnosis her brother believes was bipolar disorder. The official record is narrower. Police have confirmed two documented mental-health encounters in 2018 and 2019. In 2019 she attempted to end her life on subway tracks in Queens. After that episode, relatives say monthly injectable medication restored a fragile stability that lasted four to six years.
The marriage did not survive the same stretch of time. Court records show her husband filed for divorce in Hillsborough County, Florida, in 2020. The case, later sealed, concluded in 2025. By then Cisneros had already returned to Queens with one of her daughters. She lived in Woodside, worked intermittently for an immigration attorney, and, according to her brother, appeared “fine” as recently as the Saturday before she disappeared from routine.
That disappearance is the turning point her family now flags. She stopped her usual visits to her mother. In April her father offered to drive her to a regular appointment at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. She refused the ride and said she could go alone. Relatives later recalled that she had begun to resist depending on medication. Her brother now suspects she may have missed recent injections. No official finding has confirmed a lapse in treatment. What is confirmed is the sequence: withdrawal from family check-ins, a claim that she was well, then a sudden break with ordinary life.
On August 31, 2026, that break became public and irreversible. In Times Square she stabbed two strangers. One, a 68-year-old visitor, survived. The other, 32-year-old Erin Piacenti, did not. Police shot Cisneros after she advanced with knives and refused to drop them. She was 49.
Her brother, Patrick Peralta, has said she had never been violent toward others. He has also said the family does not understand what flipped in her mind. Relatives have framed these comments as a final disclosure about her private struggle, not an opening for further excavation of her children or her sealed divorce.
The contradiction is the story. A woman trained to study the mind could not, in the end, outrun her own. A marriage that ended in Florida court files. A course of injections that once seemed to hold the line. A last ordinary Saturday. Then absence. Mental illness is not a plot twist; it is a chronic condition that can look stable until it is not. The brother’s account does not excuse the harm done in Times Square. It does explain why those closest to her still describe two timelines: the years she functioned, and the hours when that functioning vanished.
What remains is a public tragedy and a private limit. The family has said this is as far as they will go into her interior life. The rest belongs to investigators, to the victims’ families, and to a system that met her in 2018 and 2019 and then, until the last afternoon, largely lost sight of her.
