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The woman who knifed two people in an attack in Times Square, killing one, shockingly managed to initially evade the police’s attempts to taser her, leaving many confused by how the police’s apparatus failed to work.
Pamela Cisneros, who was already known to authorities, was shot dead by police in the middle of one of New York’s most famous tourist spots, as horrified onlookers helplessly watched on.
Cisneros, 49, wielding two knives, killed a 32-year-old woman, Erin Piacenti, who later died in hospital from her injuries, while a 68-year-old man survived the attack, despite sustaining wounds to his abdomen.
Artur Sadowski, a former NYPD detective and taser expert, claimed to The New York Post that Cisneros remained unaffected by the electronic weapon after it was discharged by a police officer, due to one specific reason.
Sadowski stated that it wasn’t due to faulty equipment or incorrect usage, but rather because of Cisneros's excess weight, providing protection against the full force of the electric shock, allowing her to advance forward, threatening police officers.
“The thicker the padding in front of the muscles, the more difficult it is for the taser to get to the muscles and be effective,” Sadowski said following the event.
The now-retired cop, who wrote the NYPD’s taser playbook, claimed that the devices can only be effective when both probes make proper contact with the intended target, arguing that a combination of distance, the attacker’s fat, and movement makes that almost impossible.
From video footage circulating online, it also appears that one of the police officer’s probes struck the woman’s purse, stopping the circuit from being completed, and thus stopping the taser from working.
Tasers work by essentially stopping muscles from working temporarily, leaving those who are shot, subdued and easier to control.
The video, which did the rounds on social media, displays the terrifying incident, with Cisneros, who was a known mental health patient, waving two knives around in the air as police confronted her.
Despite law enforcement’s pleas for her to comply with their requests for her to drop her weapons and lie on the ground, she approached the officers, who were given little option but to shoot her, with the shots fired proving fatal — she later died from the wounds at a nearby hospital, according to reports.
