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Crime

Times Square stabbing leaves woman and victim dead after police shooting

A man survived in stable condition after Pamela Cisneros allegedly stabbed two people in Times Square and was fatally shot by New York City police.

NYPD officers gathered beside police vehicles in Times Square. Photo: Charles A. Pickup via Pexels · Pexels License
NYPD officers gathered beside police vehicles in Times Square. Contextual file photograph, not the events described. Contextual file imagery, not a photograph of the events described.

The man stabbed in Times Square remained alive and in stable condition, while the woman wounded in the attack died at Bellevue hospital, authorities said. Guardian US news reported that New York City police fatally shot Pamela Cisneros on Monday after she attacked two people in Times Square. Cisneros, 49, was identified as a Queens resident who carried two knives during the incident.

According to Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, Cisneros first approached a 68-year-old man and stabbed him in the abdomen before attacking a woman in the stomach. Police later confronted Cisneros and spent approximately 4 min trying to persuade her to put down the knives, officials said. Tisch said she had examined body camera footage from the encounter and described the stabbings as random and unprovoked, while also referring to Cisneros’s previous mental health problems.

Officers used stun guns when Cisneros kept advancing, but she continued moving toward them with the knives. Two officers then fired their service weapons, and Tisch said body cameras recorded the shooting. Cisneros, the male victim and the female victim were all transported to Bellevue hospital.

Cisneros and the female victim were pronounced dead there, while the man survived in stable condition. Tisch and Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, defended the officers’ use of lethal force. The shooting will nevertheless be investigated as part of the standard process for officer-involved shootings in New York. Mamdani credited the NYPD officers with intervening to stop the attack from becoming worse.

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