Victor Panebianco

Introduction

Victor Panebianco is a North Carolina man who was sentenced on September 22, 2026 to 25 years in prison for fatally stabbing Christopher Millwater, his girlfriend’s ex, in the parking lot of the upscale Stony Brook Yacht Club on Long Island in November 2025. Prosecutors cast the killing as the violent end of a love triangle: Panebianco’s girlfriend, Kacy Corso, had briefly dated Millwater before the relationship soured into what authorities described as a months-long Facebook feud. Panebianco, 32, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter the previous month, and Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said the court imposed the maximum sentence his office had requested.

Background Information

Panebianco, 32, lived in King, North Carolina. His co-defendant and girlfriend, Kacy Corso, 33, of Setauket, New York, worked as a DoorDash and Uber driver and had previously had a fling with Millwater, which ended badly: prosecutors and court filings described Corso growing increasingly hostile toward her ex after the split, at one point calling him a “grave robber” in a social-media post, and a public feud between the two that played out on Facebook in the months before the killing, with Corso accusing Millwater of deception.

Millwater, 52, was a Selden, New York, father of two and a member of the Stony Brook Yacht Club, where he liked to fish. In the days before his death he wrote a series of posts on his own Facebook page that later took on an eerie cast. “Plenty of time to rest when I’m dead so now it’s a quick shower and gym time,” he wrote two days before he was killed. The next day he hinted at a troubled past, invoking the three-sided recovery-unity-service symbol connected to sobriety: “NOBODY can throw my past in my face,” he wrote. “I will personally sit down and tell you my story, beginning to end. What may be your gossip, is your testimony. I’ve made peace with everything.”

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Adjudicated. Panebianco’s conviction on first-degree manslaughter rests on his own guilty plea in August 2026 and is a matter of court record; the account of the attack below comes from statements by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office. Corso separately pleaded guilty to the same charge. Neither case was tried to a jury.

Prosecutors said Millwater arrived at the yacht club around 3:40 a.m. on November 10, 2025, and that Panebianco and Corso were already lying in wait in the parking lot, having driven from North Carolina to ambush him. When Millwater spotted them he tried to escape by driving around their car toward the exit, but the pair’s vehicle rammed his, boxing him in; he then jumped out and tried to flee on foot.

Surveillance footage, prosecutors said, showed Panebianco giving chase “while swinging a knife,” catching up to Millwater and plunging the knife into his chest twice; Greater Long Island’s report of the plea hearing added that prosecutors said Panebianco kicked Millwater in the head as he lay motionless on the ground. Millwater’s last words, according to the New York Post’s account of the prosecution’s case, were “You’re stabbing me?” Police responded to a 911 call reporting an unconscious man in the lot and found Millwater with two stab wounds to the chest; he was pronounced dead shortly afterward at Stony Brook University Hospital.

The couple then drove back to their apartment in North Carolina, authorities said. Cell-phone records showed Panebianco had arrived on Long Island from out of state roughly 90 minutes before the killing and left New York shortly after it; he was arrested nine days later in North Carolina with the help of the Stokes County Sheriff’s Office.

Public Reaction and Consequences

Panebianco pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in August 2026, about seven months after the killing, in a plea that District Attorney Tierney said spared Millwater’s family a trial while holding Panebianco “fully accountable” — though, Tierney added, “the defendant’s guilty plea does not take away the pain of the loss that Christopher Millwater’s friends and loved ones have endured.” On September 22, 2026, a judge in Riverhead sentenced him to 25 years behind bars. “The killing of Christopher Millwater at the hands of the defendant was brutal,” Tierney said in a statement after the sentencing. “We are grateful that the court imposed the maximum sentence requested by my office. We hope that the victim’s loved ones find some solace in knowing that justice was serviced.”

Corso faced her own reckoning: she pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter for her role in the killing on July 22, 2026, and was scheduled to be sentenced to seven years in prison when she appeared before the judge the day after Panebianco.

Current Status

As of September 22, 2026, Panebianco is beginning a 25-year prison sentence for the first-degree manslaughter of Christopher Millwater, the maximum term requested by prosecutors. Corso’s sentencing to seven years was expected the following day. The case is otherwise closed: with both defendants having pleaded guilty, no trial is pending and no further charges arising from the killing have been reported.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The love triangle ended three lives. Millwater, a 52-year-old father of two, was dead at 53 days short of whatever future he had mapped out, killed in the parking lot of the club where he went to fish; his final Facebook posts, musing about rest when dead and having “made peace with everything,” became part of the public record of the case. Panebianco, 32, went from a life in North Carolina to a quarter-century in a New York prison, with the “brutal” findings of the prosecution’s case — the ambush, the chase, the two knife thrusts — permanently attached to his name through his own guilty plea. Corso, 33, traded a scattered work history as a delivery driver for a seven-year term, her Facebook feud with her ex now the documented motive in a homicide.

Sources

• New York Post, “Killer in grim love-triangle slaying at swanky Long Island yacht club lands hefty sentence,” September 22, 2026. source
• Greater Long Island, “North Carolina man pleads guilty in Stony Brook Yacht Club stabbing that followed love triangle,” August 11, 2026. source
• X post by @nypost announcing the story, September 22, 2026. source