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.