Before she was Debrina, she was Debbie.
In her hometown of Little Falls, NJ, Debbie Kawam was a girl who wanted to be around: the cheerleader with the inner glow, giving high-fives in the hallways of Passaic Valley Regional High School, cruising with friends, striking a pose against against a backdrop of Led Zeppelin posters, welcoming guests to the Perkins Pancake House in a hostess outfit.
In her 20s, Ms. Kawam was the life of the party, jetting off with friends to Las Vegas and the Caribbean and living the moment.
Later will come years of darkness, then decades. And on December 22, Ms Kawam was set on fire on a Brooklyn subway train in an apparently random attack captured on chilling video. For nine days, the woman was anonymous in death. After her body was identified on Tuesday, the mourning could begin.
As her adopted name, Debrina, flashed across the news, classmates gathered memories to erase the indelible image of a human figure outlined in flame.
“So sweet and kind,” said her one-time Pancake House colleague Diane Risoldi, 57, whom Ms. Kawam had helped get the job. “I can still see her in the black skirt and pink button down. Always smiling.”
“She seemed like a girl who would have everything,” Susan Fraser said.
Ms. Kawam, 57, grew up in a small white house on a street dotted with modest single-family homes. Her father worked on the assembly line at the General Motors plant in Linden. Her mother worked in a bakery, said Malcolm Fraser, Susan’s husband and a childhood friend of Ms Kawam’s. He had an older brother and sister.
Joe Rocco, who often walked home from school with Debbie, said that at recess, kids used to throw balls at her just to have an excuse to be around her.
Mark Monteyne, 57, was the captain of the Passaic Valley Hornets football team in 1984, which meant he personally had a cheerleader with him: Debbie Kawam. “It was really such a bright light,” he said. One of her tasks was to decorate his locker for match day. “Every game had something special – balloons, stickers,” he recalled.
When Mr. Monteyne was struggling in chemistry, Ms. Kawam shared her notes with him. “He always helped me try to pass class,” she said.
After graduation, Ms. Kawam attended classes at Montclair State College a few towns away, and Mr. Monteyne saw her around campus in the first semester. But he soon left and they lost touch before he graduated.
Cindy Certosimo Bowie had known Mrs. Kawam since the third grade. In their 20s, they became fast friends and travel partners.
“We went to Jamaica, Cancun, the Bahamas, Las Vegas,” Ms. Bowie said. “We went to clubs, lay in the sun. When we got home we would just book another trip. It was like a three-year streak of places they were going.”
Ms Kawam always worked, though rarely for long in any one place, Ms Bowie said. “She did the jumbled job for a while,” said Mrs Bowie, 56, who now manages a school cafeteria. Ms. Kawam worked at Sharp Electronics headquarters in Mahwah, among other jobs, Ms. recalled. Bowie.
Ms Bowie said Ms Kawam was sometimes at odds with her parents. “Always go against the grind. they said white, she said black,” Ms Bowie said. “It could have been the age.” Ms Kawam’s family declined to be interviewed for this article.
But eventually Ms. Bowie calmed down and lost touch with her friend.
Details about Ms. Kawam’s life after that are harder to come by. In her 30s, she worked for a few years at Merck, the pharmaceutical company, as a customer service representative. Around 2000, she began a relationship with a man who worked for an electrical company. They lived in a house by the Passaic River below her childhood home, according to the man’s ex-wife. In 2003, Ms. Kawam legally changed her first name to Debrina.
The couple divorced in 2008, around the time the house went into foreclosure. By then, Ms. Kawam had not worked for a long time and had begun to scratch with alcohol in accordance with the law. When she filed for bankruptcy that year, her total assets consisted of an $800 Dodge Neon, a $300 TV and futon, and some clothing.
Years after selling the Kawam family home in Little Falls, Mrs. Fraser and her husband said they ran into Mrs. Kawam. She seemed “disturbed and high on something,” Malcolm Fraser said.
Mrs. Kawam spent most of the last twelve years of her life in the southern part of the state. She lived with a man in Toms River for several years. The man later married someone else and his widow said he had described his previous relationship as a mess.
Ms. Kawam spent a lot of time in Atlantic City, about an hour south, and court records show a string of drinking summonses from 2017 to last year.
Ms. Kawam’s mother also lived in Toms River. A neighbor said she did not know any women, but someone around Ms Kawam’s age had been coming and going from the house. The older woman was leading the younger one by the hand, as if she needed help getting around.
This past fall, Mrs. Kawam came to New York, apparently with nowhere to stay. On November 29, a homeless service group met her at Grand Central Terminal. The next day, she entered a women’s shelter. Two days later, she was assigned to a shelter in the Bronx. He never showed.
Early on the frosty morning of December 22, as Ms. Kawam slept on a parked F train at the end of the line in Coney Island, a man approached her. Without a word, he threw a lighter at her. The man, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, then watched as it burned, police said. He has been charged with murder.
The news of Ms. Kawam’s descent and unspeakable death left her classmates feeling devastated, empty and incomplete. “I honestly didn’t know her demons, the background of what was going on,” said Mr Monteyne, the former footballer. “If we only knew.”
