Fordham Law Grad Killed In Times Square Knife Attack

Erin Piacenti, a 2021 graduate of Fordham Law School and a vice president at Bank of America, was killed Monday afternoon in a knife attack in Times Square. She was 32.

Piacenti, who lived in Chester, New Jersey, was one of two people stabbed near 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue at around 4:30 p.m., in what the NYPD described as an unprovoked attack. She was stabbed in the abdomen and pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later.

Police identified the assailant as Pamela Cisneros, a 49-year-old Queens woman with what officials described as a documented history of mental illness. According to the account NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch gave reporters, Cisneros pulled two kitchen knives from a Target bag and first stabbed a 68-year-old man who had just come up from the subway with his wife at West 41st Street. She then moved a block north and attacked Piacenti. The two stabbings happened roughly 20 seconds apart. The man is expected to survive.

Officers surrounded Cisneros and, police said, spent several minutes trying to talk to her while she was still armed; when she charged at them with the knives, officers opened fire. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

Piacenti earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and her J.D. from Fordham Law in 2021, and she had built a career at the intersection of law and finance — serving, according to her LinkedIn profile, as Bank of America’s Vice President of Business Selection and Conflicts.

She had celebrated her second wedding anniversary on August 10, just three weeks before she died. Our thoughts are with her family, her husband, her colleagues, and the Fordham Law community.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

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