A 49-year-old Queens woman with a documented history of mental illness pulled two kitchen knives from a red Target bag and went on a random stabbing rampage in the heart of Times Square Monday afternoon, killing one stranger, wounding another, then charging NYPD officers while screaming she’d rather kill them than drop her weapons.
Pamela Cisneros was shot dead by police behind the NYPD’s Times Square substation after tasers failed to stop her. The female victim, 32, was pronounced dead. The male victim, 68, was stabbed in the abdomen and hospitalized.
The bloodshed started just after 4:24 p.m. near West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue. Cisneros approached the older man as he came out of the subway and waited to cross with his wife. She waved the knives, then plunged one into his right side. About 20 seconds later, a block north at 42nd Street, she fatally stabbed the younger woman in the abdomen. Police called both attacks unprovoked and random.
She then headed toward the police substation, still clutching both blades.
Officers spent roughly four minutes giving “numerous commands” to drop the knives. Cisneros refused.“I’m not dropping anything. I would rather kill both of you. I will kill you,” she told them, according to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
Multiple tasers were fired. They didn’t work. Cisneros kept advancing, knives out, in a crowded tourist corridor packed with families, workers and commuters. Two officers opened fire. She was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital.
Harrowing bystander video from a different angle, widely shared after the first clips surfaced, shows the confrontation in grim detail: officers backing up, the woman in a pink shirt and jeans hobbling forward with blades raised, shots ringing out, then cops rushing in to handcuff her and render aid as panicked crowds scatter. Audio captures her threat as she closes the distance.
Witnesses described chaos. Construction worker Jorge Disla said cops were shouting “Drop the knives!” as she swung both weapons. A fruit-cart vendor, Hassan Abdallah, 41, saw the wounded man clutching his side while his wife tried to stop the bleeding with paper and a scarf. A delivery worker coming out of a building watched people running west and found a man on the ground in a pool of blood.
Cisneros had prior contacts with the NYPD over mental illness in 2018 and 2019 but no arrest record. Authorities said the attack was not terrorism-related. A motive has not been established. Body-worn cameras captured the shooting; an internal investigation is underway.
Tisch called it “an extraordinarily dangerous situation unfolding in the heart of Times Square, the Crossroads of the World,” with thousands of people moving through the streets at any given moment.
“Our officers were confronted with a rapidly evolving threat with countless innocent people around them. In that moment they did what we trained them to do,” she said. “But tonight, our thoughts are, of course, with the victims of this horrific attack and their families. One life, cut far too short by a senseless act of violence.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani thanked the officers for stopping the attacker before more people were hurt. Times Square Alliance President Tom Harris said the department “put themselves in harm’s way.”
The knives were recovered. Traffic was shut down for blocks as investigators processed the scene, blood on the pavement, a souvenir shop as backdrop, and another reminder that even the city’s most photographed intersection is never more than a few seconds from someone in crisis with a blade.
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