Friends From Debrina Kawam’s Happy Past Aghast After Subway Burning

Before she was Debrina, she was Debbie.

In her town of Little Falls, N.J., Debbie Kawam was a girl people wanted to be around: the cheerleader with the inner glow, dispensing high-fives in the hallways of Passaic Valley Regional High School, cruising with friends, striking a pose against a backdrop of Led Zeppelin posters, welcoming diners at Perkins Pancake House in her hostess uniform.

Into her 20s, Ms. Kawam was the life of the party, flying off with girlfriends to Las Vegas and the Caribbean and living in the moment.

Later would come years of darkness, then decades. And on Dec. 22, Ms. Kawam was set afire on a subway train in Brooklyn in an apparently random attack captured on harrowing video. For nine days, the woman was anonymous in death. After her body was identified on Tuesday, the grieving could begin.

As the name she had adopted, Debrina, flashed across the news, classmates mustered memories to blot out the indelible image of a human figure outlined in flame.

“So sweet and kind,” said her onetime 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 was going to have everything,” said Susan Fraser.

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. She had an older brother and sister.

Joe Rocco, who often walked home from school with Debbie, said that at recess, kids used to send kickballs flying in her direction just to have an excuse to be near her.

Mark Monteyne, 57, was the captain of the Passaic Valley Hornets football team in 1984, which meant he had a cheerleader personally paired with him: Debbie Kawam. “She was really that bright light,” he said. One of her tasks was to decorate his locker for game day. “Every game there was something special — balloons, stickers,” he remembered.

When Mr. Monteyne struggled in chemistry, Ms. Kawam shared her notes with him. “She was always helping me try to pass the class,” he said.

After graduation, Ms. Kawam took classes at Montclair State College a few towns away, and Mr. Monteyne saw her around campus the first semester. But she soon left, and they lost touch before he graduated.

Cindy Certosimo Bowie had known Ms. Kawam since third grade. In their 20s, they became fast friends and travel partners.

“We went to Jamaica, Cancun, Bahamas, Las Vegas,” Ms. Bowie said. “We’d go to clubs, lay out in the sun. When we went home we’d just book another trip. It was like a three-year stretch of going places.”

Ms. Kawam was always working, though seldom too long at any one place, Ms. Bowie said. “She kind of did the job shuffle for a while,” said Ms. Bowie, 56, who now manages a school cafeteria. Ms. Kawam worked at the headquarters of Sharp Electronics in Mahwah, among other jobs, Ms. Bowie recalled.

Ms. Bowie said that sometimes Ms. Kawam was at odds with her parents. “She was always going against the grind; they said white, she said black,” Ms. Bowie said. “Could have been the age.” Ms. Kawam’s family declined to be interviewed for this article.

But eventually Ms. Bowie settled down, and she, too, lost touch with her friend.

Details of Ms. Kawam’s life after that are harder to find. In her 30s, she worked for a couple of years at Merck, the pharmaceutical company, as a customer service representative. Around 2000, she embarked on a relationship with a man who worked for an electric utility. They lived in a house by the Passaic River down the street from her childhood home, according to the man’s ex-wife. In 2003, Ms. Kawam legally changed her first name to Debrina.

The couple split in 2008, around the time the house went into foreclosure. By then, Ms. Kawam had not worked for some time and had started having alcohol-fueled scrapes with the law. When she filed for bankruptcy that year, the whole of her assets consisted of a Dodge Neon valued at $800, a television and a futon worth $300 and some clothes.

Years after the Kawam family home in Little Falls was sold, Ms. Fraser and her husband said they ran into Ms. Kawam. She looked “distraught and high on something,” said Malcolm Fraser.

Ms. Kawam spent most of the last dozen 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 that he had described his previous relationship as chaos.

Ms. Kawam spent considerable time in Atlantic City, about an hour south, and court records show a string of summonses for public drinking from 2017 through last year.

Ms. Kawam’s mother also lived in Toms River. A neighbor said she did not know either woman, but someone Ms. Kawam’s age would come and go from the house. The older woman would lead the younger by the hand, as if she needed help getting around.

This past fall, Ms. Kawam came to New York, apparently with no place to stay. On Nov. 29, a homeless-outreach team encountered her at Grand Central Terminal. The next day, she checked into an intake shelter for women. Two days after that, she was assigned to a shelter in the Bronx. She never showed.

Early on the frigid morning of Dec. 22, as Ms. Kawam slept on a parked F train at the end of the line in Coney Island, a man approached her. Without so much as a word, he flicked a lighter at her. The man, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, then watched as she burned, the police said. He has been charged with murder.

The news of Ms. Kawam’s descent and unspeakable death left her classmates feeling devastated and empty and unfinished. “I honestly didn’t know her demons, the backdrop of what was going on,” said Mr. Monteyne, the former football player. “If we only knew.”