Erin Piacenti was 32, had a five-month-old daughter and had just returned to work from maternity leave. On 31 August, at around 16:24, she was walking home from the office through Times Square in New York. She never got there.

Pamela Cisneros, 49, holding two large knives, attacked two people in the square. She first stabbed a 68-year-old man coming out of the subway with his wife - he survived and is in a stable condition. In under twenty seconds she came upon Piacenti and stabbed her in the stomach. She was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but could not be saved.

Police found Cisneros with the knives still in her hands. They negotiated for about four minutes. She threatened them: "I'm not dropping anything. I'd sooner kill you both." When she moved towards the officers, two of them opened fire. She died in the same hospital as the woman she had killed.

What makes this story harder is not the attack, but what stood before it. Cisneros had no criminal record. She had a record of a different kind. In 2018 police found her shouting and behaving aggressively in Manhattan. In 2019 they intervened when she tried to jump in front of a train on the subway in Queens. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder about a decade ago. Her family says she was on medication.

So the system saw her. It logged her twice. And then sent her back into the same city. Her father, Mario Cisneros, apologised publicly: "I am sorry for what my daughter did. I am suffering just as they are suffering." The family says she was never violent and that there was no sign of anything at their last meeting.

Police ruled out any connection to terrorism. The attack was random, unprovoked, between people who did not know each other. That is exactly what makes it frightening - there is no motive that can be explained, no logic that can be followed, nothing the victim could have done differently.

Piacenti graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, then law at Fordham in 2021, magna cum laude. She worked as a legal intern at Major League Baseball, then at the law firm Davis Polk and Wardwell, and for the last eighteen months or so was a vice president at Bank of America. She married in August 2024, bought her first house in New Jersey in September 2025, and her daughter had just been baptised. The bank's president for corporate and investment banking described her in an internal message as "a much-valued colleague and friend."

That is a list every one of us recognises - stages that look like they are leading somewhere. The question that remains is not about her. The question is why a woman with two police interventions for attempted suicide and aggression stayed invisible to every system meant to follow her, right up to the moment she became visible in the worst possible way.