2026.9.2 Justice Department sues Kansas school system over policies on transgender students
2026.9.2 What happens next if the jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial can’t reach a verdict?
2026.9.2 Lindsay Clancy verdict still within reach – retired Massachusetts judge pushes back on hung-jury predictions
Jurors deliberating first-degree murder charges in the deaths of three children were directed to resume discussions Wednesday
2026.9.2 Tucson, Arizona, police investigate gay bar shooting as a possible hate crime
Police in Arizona say a shooting at a Tucson gay bar that left three people dead, including the shooter, is being investigated as a possible hate crime.
Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, and Cameron Davis Capara, 33, were shot in the parking lot of Venture-N shortly after midnight Monday, and both died at the scene, the Tucson Police Department said. The suspect, Ousman Ceesay, 44, also suffered a gunshot wound and was pronounced dead at a local hospital, according to the department.
Ceesay was carrying a note that listed several LGBTQIA+-associated businesses, according to a police news release, and initial evidence suggests he confronted the two victims in the parking lot before shooting them.
The investigation is ongoing, but there is no known active threat to the community, police said. Still, the department has increased its police presence around other gay-friendly businesses in the region.
“Bias-based crimes are especially heinous and have no place in our community,” Chief of Police Monica Prieto said. “Our investigators are thoroughly examining the evidence and pursuing all available leads as they work to establish the full circumstances surrounding this tragic incident.”
The police department released few details about the shooting and did not say whether Ceesay knew the victims. The department also declined to immediately release details about Ceesay’s manner of death beyond saying he had a gunshot wound. The department’s public information officer, James Horton, said investigators were awaiting details from the medical examiner to confirm Ceesay’s injuries.
Flowers, candles and photos marked a growing memorial to Siqueiros and Capara outside the bar Tuesday, and several community groups, including Tucson Queerstory, Southern Arizona Senior Pride and the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, were planning a candlelight vigil for Wednesday night at a local park.
“Venture-N has been a safe haven, a sanctuary, and a place of comfort for Tucson’s queer community for decades,” PFLAG Phoenix wrote in a social media post. “This tragedy is a heavy and painful reminder of the homophobia and hate that still exists.”
The shooting left members of the LGBTQIA+ community shocked and heartbroken, said Mary O’Donoghue, the executive director of Southern Arizona Senior Pride. It also stirred up traumatic memories for many older adults, damaging the sense of safety they had in an otherwise often-welcoming city, said O’Donoghue, whose organization provides supportive services and healthy aging programming for LGBTQ seniors.
“We’re talking about folks that are in their 70s and 80s, having lived through Stonewall and other experiences where there has been discrimination, aggression and violence,” O’Donoghue said. “It really has a rippling effect — they’re reliving a lifetime of violence and discrimination on their community.”
O’Donoghue said one person she talked to had moved to Tucson from Colorado Springs, Colorado, where a shooting at a gay nightclub in 2022 left five people dead. Other group members retired to Tucson after living in Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 others were wounded in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said the shooting at Venture-N was a “direct and devastating attack on our LGBTQ+ community, another senseless act of gun violence.”
The shooting “serves as another painful reminder that homophobia is still rampant in our country,” Romero said in a video posted to Facebook.
2026.9.2 Man put to death for girl’s killing as Florida carries out its 14th execution of the year
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2026.9.2 Knife-wielding woman kills 1, wounds another in Times Square before being shot dead by police, mayor says
New York — A woman carrying two knives stabbed two people “in the heart” of busy Times Square in about 20 seconds on Monday afternoon, killing one, before police shot and killed her after a tense four-minute standoff, officials said.
The first victim, a 32-year-old woman, identified as Bank of America Vice President Erin Piacenti from Chester, New Jersey, was stabbed in the abdomen and pronounced dead at a hospital, a law enforcement official told CNN. Piacenti was on her way home when she was attacked, the official said.
The second victim, a 68-year-old man was also stabbed in the abdomen in what appeared to be a “random and unprovoked attack,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said, though he is currently in stable condition.
The victims and perpetrator were taken to Bellevue Hospital, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said.
The stabbing took place on Seventh Avenue in one of the busiest pedestrian areas in the world, where Tisch said thousands of commuters, families and tourists were nearby.
The maniac who stabbed two people, killing one, in Times Square was likely able to battle through police tasers because of her body fat, erratic movements — and her purse, an expert told The Post.
Artur Sadowski, a retired NYPD detective and Taser expert, said Pamela Cisneros, 49, was able to fight off multiple Taser deployments because the officers were unable to make solid contact with the waddling killer.
“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 Tuesday of the body-fat factor.
Sadowski, who wrote the Taser playbook that the NYPD used for training, noted that the devices can only work when both of its probes make solid contact — and that there was enough distance between the officers and jostling stabber to make that all but impossible.
One of the cops’ probes also struck the deranged woman’s purse, which was wrapped around her body — preventing the circuit in that case from connecting and causing neuromuscular incapacitation, a temporary stop of muscle control.
The shocking caught-on-camera mayhem shows the NYPD cops confronting Cisneros, who has long struggled with mental health, holding two knives up in the air just after she attacked two people near West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue on Monday.
The woman, who ignored cops’ pleas to drop the knives, was tased as she started to wildly swing the knives in the air before eventually being fatally shot when she charged at them, the footage shows.
When the cops tried tasing her to bring her down, they appeared to hit her at least once in the middle of her stomach, Sadowski said.
But “even when probes hit, a narrow spread, thick clothing, or body fat can limit the electrical effect,” the former Axon master instructor said, adding that areas like the back and back of the legs have less fat and make tasers more effective.
“She may have felt pain or muscle cramping in her abdomen but not enough to stop her from advancing.”
Sadowski said at least three tasers were fired off in about a second — with a possible fourth discharged right as Cisneros was gunned down by cops.
She died from her gunshot wounds at Bellevue Hospital, officials said.
Her victims include Erin Piacenti, a 32-year-old University of Pennsylvania and Fordham Law graduate, who died due to her injuries, sources told The Post.
Piacenti, who was an executive at Bank of America, had just celebrated her second wedding anniversary in August, social media posts show.
The other victim, a 68-year-old man, was stabbed in the abdomen.x1200
The stunned family of Times Square stabber Pamela Cisneros says she had a decades-long history of mental illness including postpartum depression, multiple hospitalizations — and a suicide attempt in which she threw herself on the subway tracks.
Cisneros, 49, randomly stabbed two strangers, killing one of them, before NYPD officers shot her dead — but her brother Patrick Peralta told the Daily News he never knew her to harm anyone other than herself before Monday’s rampage.
“I don’t know what was in her head,“ Peralta, 59, said Tuesday. “I can’t tell you what she was thinking or if she just completely went blank. I don’t know where that rage came from.”
Cisneros had written about randomly stabbing people in a long-winded screed about “the end times” she posted to Facebook last year.
“There is news of war, pestilence, earthquakes, the disminished [sic] love of people to the point of stabbing others for no reason, sex slavery in this country and around the globe, widespread drug use, persecution of the Christian believer on a global scale, worldwide hunger, homelessness, etc.,” Cisneros wrote as evidence of the end times “being present” on Nov. 30, 2025.
Peralta, a certified surgical technician, has a different father than Cisneros, but the two grew up together with their mother in an apartment in Jackson Heights.
“She was a happy-go-lucky kid,” Peralta recalled. “In summertime, she was my tail because she would follow me around. She was like 5. I went out and played with my friends and she was always with me all the time.”
Her mental health problems developed about two decades ago, after she gave birth to the second of her three daughters.
“She went off track after that,” Peralta said.
Postpartum depression has come into the national spotlight with the Massachusetts trial of Lindsey Clancy, who’s accused of murdering her three children in January 2023. Clancy’s defense lawyer has argued she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
On Tuesday, the jury announced it had deadlocked on a verdict, though the judge overseeing the case sent them back for more deliberations.
Cisneros’ middle child is autistic and nonverbal and lives in a group home in Brooklyn, Peralta said. Cisneros would often visit her.
Her other two daughters live in Florida with their father, Pamela’s ex-husband. Peralta had to break the news to those two daughters over the phone Tuesday night.
Cisneros, who has no arrest history in New York, has been hospitalized several times and seven years ago threw herself on the subway tracks in Queens only to be rescued by an onlooker, Peralta said.
“Then she was in Jamaica Hospital,” he said. “Then she went to Bellevue (Hospital) a couple of times. She was seeing doctors.”
Police sources confirm Cisneros jumped onto the tracks on the E train line at the Union Turnpike station on March 6, 2019.
That was one of two mental health crises involving the NYPD, the sources said. In the other incident, cops were called because she was drunk, screaming and acting belligerent at a hotel on Lexington Ave. near E. 49th St. in Midtown East on Dec. 20, 2018.
Because she had trouble taking daily psychiatric medication Cisneros was prescribed monthly injections instead, her brother said.
“For the last six years now, she was getting injections and nothing was wrong,” he said. “As long as she got the medication, she was fine … She never showed any violence towards anybody.”
“She used to go in person (to get the injections) and then I just found out that now she was doing it herself,” he added.
“So I don’t know if she stopped doing it, because my parents are old and are they trying to check to make sure that she was getting injections. That’s the only thing I can suggest, that maybe she didn’t get the last couple of months of injections. Her brain was going all over.”
On Monday, Cisneros pulled two kitchen knives out of a Target bag and stabbed a 68-year-old Rhode Island man in the abdomen near W. 41st St. and Seventh Ave. at 4:24 p.m., cops said. He survived.
Within 20 seconds, she made her way to W. 42nd St. and fatally stabbed 32-year-old Erin Piacenti, a vice president at Bank of America. Police surrounded her near an NYPD substation by W. 43rd St., and Tased then fatally shot her as she advanced on them, swinging a knife in each hand.
“She used to come and eat dinner with my parents mostly every night,” Peralta said. “But last week she didn’t show, so we started calling her to see what was going on.”
Peralta recognized his sister from the viral cell phone videos that made the news showing her final moments.
“I was shocked,” he said. “I’m still numb. I saw it on the news last night. Something told me that she looks like my sister. So I called Midtown South. I give them my info and then by 7:30 (p.m.), they called me back.”
He last saw her for her father’s birthday on Aug, 8. “She was fine. Normal,” he said.
Her mother last talked to her on the phone Saturday.
“(Cisneros) said she was fine,” Peralta recounted. “My mother is devastated.”
Cisneros was living alone in Woodside and had been out of work for a while. But three months ago she landed a job as an administrative assistant for a lawyer, her brother said.
“My entire family feels so sorry for the two people, the one that passed away and the one who was hurt,” Peralta said. “We are so sorry. We never thought this would happen.”
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2026.9.2 Judge rules alleged Charlie Kirk killer can stand trial for capital murder
Judge Tony Graf’s decision follows final oral arguments from both sides Tuesday.
2026.9.2 Pennsylvania police officer charged with voluntary manslaughter in killing of college student
NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A Pennsylvania police officer was charged Tuesday with voluntary manslaughter for last week’s fatal shooting of a college student who was looking for his friends late at night and went to the wrong house.
Police body camera video reviewed by investigators shows the officer yelled “Drop to the ground,” then “Stop or I’ll… .” Before he finished the sentence, he fired two shots at the man who was unarmed and had his hands in the air. He hit 22-year-old Glenwood Earl Pysher IV twice in the chest, killing him.
The officer, Upper Pottsgrove Police Cpl. Sean Farrell, had less-than-lethal options and did not need to resort to shooting Pysher, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said at a news conference.
“The investigation found that Cpl. Farrell had less-than-lethal options on his utility belt that he did not employ, including a taser. At the time of the shooting, the officer was a safe distance from Pysher behind a car, and the victim had his hands in the air and did not possess any type of weapon. Mr. Pysher was not a threat. This is not a legal use of deadly force, leading to the charge of Voluntary Manslaughter,” Steele said in a news release.
2026.9.1 Beverly Hills teen accused of killing homeless man in alley — as chilling videos emerge
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