Subway Victim's Brutal End Stuns Friends From Her Happy Past

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/04/nyregion/woman-set-on-fire-debrina-kawam.html

Subway Victim’s Brutal End Stuns Friends From Her Happy Past
Debbie Kawam, as she was known in high school, was a cheerleader and a sunny presence. As the decades went on, she fell into an abyss.
By Andy Newman and Shayla Colon
Jan. 4, 2025

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.


From right, Debbie Kawam and her friends Cindy Certosimo Bowie and Jodi Rys on vacation in Las Vegas in the 1990s. “We used to call ourselves the Three Musketeers,” Ms. Bowie said. (via Cindy Certosimo Bowie)

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[hlthe2b]

1. 'Hard to imagine a more tragic story..." Society eats our own alive and then throws them away...

I'm sorry you were forgotten in such a horrendous way and left to suffer unimaginably.