Penn alumni have become the subjects of recent marquee street-crime headlines — from 2020 Engineering graduate Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to 2016 College graduate Erin Piacenti becoming the victim of a random stabbing. These cases often stir panic on social media given both their brutality and spontaneity. And without fail, certain users always offer their two cents on how to avoid violent attacks.
Footage of the gruesome attack has been making the rounds online. We can see Piacenti, a Bank of America vice president who had just returned from maternity leave, walking along Seventh Avenue in the heart of Times Square. Amid the crowd, Pamela Cisneros pulls two knives from a shopping bag and fatally stabs Piacenti off camera.
Piacenti wasn’t wearing headphones or lingering in place, which would have made little difference in the horde of tourists and commuters. Yet according to users online, had she only looked around more intently or somehow heard the right warning cue, she might have had a chance to run — though I’m not sure how she was supposed to divine that Cisneros was armed in the first place.
One X user suggests that citygoers like Piacenti “keep [their] head[s] on a swivel.” Another adds that “if you … pay attention to your surroundings there’s zero reason for this to be your fate.”
Many of these posts are heavily ratioed edge cases, drawing more views than likes and fire in reply threads. But the idea that victims could prevent unprovoked attacks is not new, particularly at Penn. In late 2025, a group of individuals was repeatedly striking University City pedestrians in the backs of their heads before fleeing. The attacks often occurred in high-traffic parts of campus, including outside 1920 Commons as people left near closing time or near Wawa on Spruce Street, just beyond a stretch of fraternity houses. In response, public safety officials urged residents to avoid distractions such as phones and earbuds. And as for the advice that members of the r/UPenn subreddit dish out to incoming students: “You do need to just exercise general awareness — don’t wander into ‘bad’ neighborhoods, don’t just hang around a corner, don’t walk with your earphones in at night.”
These precautions are valuable because we can be on the defensive more easily than we can control a random aggressor’s behavior. But our ability to take precautions tells us little about their causal importance in preventing victimization.
According to an estimate by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 0.77% of Americans age 12 or older experienced at least one violent victimization by a stranger during 2024. In this study, the BJS considered robberies or assaults arising from disputes with strangers, among other incidents, so random street attacks constitute only part of that percentage. The numbers are another way of saying that it makes little sense to move through public life treating every stranger as a potential murderer. If anything, through July 2026, New York City registered 149 murders, the lowest first-seven-month total in the New York City Police Department’s recorded history.
And that’s the problem with suspicious behavior in the abstract: if you know that someone has a weapon, you can get away. But if all you know is that someone seems “off,” you attempt to stay calm while figuring out what exactly you are looking at. The advice is sensible enough, but it requires pedestrians to diagnose the genre of danger before anything has actually happened.
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As viewers of these violent clips, we know which stranger in the footage poses the danger. Nevertheless, a pedestrian in Times Square sees thousands of strangers. On zoomed-in footage, it was impossible not to notice Cisneros spinning around knives like nunchucks. Piacenti, however, did not see that scene from the vantage point body-camera footage later gives us. Before the attack, Cisneros’ behavior still fell somewhere within the vast New York behavioral spectrum between imminent threat and some guy on the L train having a Monday.
Commentators who dwell on supposed warning signs create a false narrative of violent street crime as being predictable. They leave us thinking that victims have more time to react than they actually do. When we internalize that false expectation, we become less prepared for how sudden an attack can be. This negligence puts all of us in greater danger — especially on a campus where UPennAlerts are often at the top of our recent texts.
As for more reasonable advice, the Upper Darby Township Police Department, just outside Philadelphia, recommends keeping a personal alarm on hand while walking. Nearby Upper Merion Township Police similarly adds that whistles or personal alarms can alert folks nearby when something is wrong. While no precaution can guarantee enough reaction time during a sudden attack, advice of this kind can at least respect the nature of the situation as it actually occurred.
Once a lack of vigilance becomes our go-to explanation for why someone became a victim, we relieve ourselves of the burden of reckoning that some attacks are beyond our control. Unfortunately, many of us will keep claiming the moral high ground, offering opinions about what someone should have done, until life puts us in the same position.
MRITIKA SENTHIL is a senior from Columbia, S.C. Her email is mritikas@upenn.edu.
