Before she was Debrina, she was Debbie.
In her hometown of Little Falls, NJ, Debbie Kawam was the girl people wanted to be with: a cheerleader with an inner glow, dishing out high-fives in the hallways of Passaic Valley Regional High School, sailing with friends, clapping behind posters of -Led Zeppelin, welcoming diners to Perkins Pancake House in his host uniform.
During the 20s, Mrs. Kawam was the life of the party, flying with girlfriends to Las Vegas and the Caribbean and living it up.
Later would come the dark years, then decades. And on Dec. 22, Mrs. Kawam was set on fire on a Brooklyn subway in an apparently premeditated attack captured on gruesome video. For nine days the woman was not known to die. After his body was identified on Tuesday, the grief could begin.
As her adopted name, Debrina, appeared in the news, her classmates pieced together memories to erase the indelible image of the flame.
“It’s sweet and kind,” said her former pancake-house colleague Diane Risoldi, 57, Ms. Kawam helped him find a job. “I can still see her wearing a black skirt and a pink button down. I always smile.”
“She seemed like a girl who would have everything,” said Susan Fraser.
Ms. Kawam, 57, grew up in a small white house on a street full of single-family homes. His 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 friend of Ms. Kawam in childhood. He had an older brother and sister.
Joe Rocco, who used to walk home from school with Debbie, said that during recess, the kids used to send kickballs flying towards him just to have an excuse to be near him.
Mark Monteyne, 57, was the captain of the Passaic Valley Hornets football team in 1984, which means he had a singer to accompany him in person: Debbie Kawam. “She was that bright light,” he said. One of his jobs was decorating his locker for game day. “At every game there was something special – balloons, stickers,” he recalled.
When Mr. As Monteyne struggles with chemistry, Ms. Kawam shares her notes with him. “He always helped me try to pass the class,” he said.
After graduation, Mrs. Kawam studied at Montclair State College, part of which was in Little Falls, and Mr. Monteyne saw him around campus the first semester. But soon he left, and they did not communicate before he graduated.
Cindy Certosimo Bowie had known Ms. Kawam since the third grade. In their 20s, they became fast friends and travel partners.
“We went to Jamaica, Cancun, the Bahamas, Las Vegas,” said Ms. Bowie. “We used to go to clubs, lie in the sun. When we went home we would just book another trip. It was like a three-year period of going places.”
Mrs. Kawam was always working, although he was rarely in any one place for long, Ms Bowie said. “He did something to juggle work for a while,” said Ms. Bowie, 56, who now runs the school cafeteria. Ms. Kawam worked at Sharp Electronics headquarters in Mahwah, among other jobs, Ms. Bowie recalled.
Ms Bowie said that sometimes Ms Kawam did not get along with her parents. “He was always against milling; they said white, he said black,” said Ms. Bowie. “It could be years.” 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 hard to come by. In her 30s, she worked for a few years at Merck, a 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 near the Passaic River down the street from his child’s home, according to the man’s ex-wife. In 2003, Ms. Kawam officially changed her name to Debrina.
The couple separated in 2008, during a foreclosure. At that time, Mrs. Kawam had been out of work for a long time and had started drinking alcohol by law. When he filed for bankruptcy that year, his total assets included an $800 Dodge Neon, a $300 television and futon, and some clothing.
Years after the Kawam family home in Little Falls was sold, Ms. Fraser and her husband said they met Ms. Mine. He looked “frustrated and full of something,” Malcolm Fraser said.
Mrs. Kawam spent most of her twelve years in the southern part of the state. She lived with a man in Toms River for several years. The man later remarried, and his widow said she had described their previous relationship as chaotic.
Ms. Kawam spent most of her time in Atlantic City, about an hour south, and court records show a string of public drinking summonses from 2017 to last year.
Ms Kawam’s mother also lived in Toms River. The neighbor said that he does not know a single woman either, but there is someone the same size as Ms. Kawam who comes in and out of the house. The old woman was leading the younger one by the hand, as if she needed help to navigate.
This past fall, Ms. Kawam arrived in New York, apparently homeless. On Nov. 29, a group of homeless people met him at Grand Central Terminal. The next day, she checked out a women’s shelter. Two days later, he was assigned to a shelter in the Bronx. He didn’t show.
In the cold morning of the 22nd of December, as Mrs. Kawam was sleeping on the F train at the end of the line at Coney Island, when a man approached him. He didn’t say anything, he flashed him with the light. The man, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, then watched it burn, police said. He was charged with murder.
The news of the birth of Ms. His death inexplicably left his classmates despondent and empty and unfulfilled. “Honestly, I didn’t know his demons, the background of what was happening,” said Mr. Monteyne, a former football player. “If only we knew.”
Source link
