Before she was Debrina, she was Debbie.
In her hometown of Little Falls, NJ, Debbie Kavam was the kind of girl people wanted to be around: the cheerleader with an inner glow, distributing high-fives in the hallways of Passaic Valley Regional High School, hanging out with friends, posing against a lead. Zeppelin poster background, welcoming diners to Perkins Pancake House in her hostess uniform.
In her 20s, Ms. Kavam was the life of the party, flying to Las Vegas and the Caribbean with girlfriends and living the moment.
Later there will come years of darkness, then decades. And on December 22, Ms. Kavam was set on fire on a subway train in Brooklyn in an apparently random attack that was captured on harrowing video. The woman remained anonymous due to her death for nine days. The period of mourning could begin after his body was identified on Tuesday.
As soon as her adopted name, Debrina, appeared on the news, classmates scrambled to erase the indelible image of the human figure outlined in flame.
“Very sweet and kind,” said her pancake-house co-worker Dianne Risoldi, 57, whom Ms. Kavam had helped get the job. “I can still see her in the black skirt and pink button-down. always smiling.”
Susan Fraser said, “She seemed like a girl who would have everything.”
Ms. Kavam, 57, grew up in a small white house on a street of modest single-family homes. His father worked on the assembly line at the General Motors plant in Linden. Malcolm Fraser, Suzanne’s husband and a childhood friend of Ms Kavam, said her mother worked in a bakery. He had an elder brother and sister.
Joe Rocco, who often walked home from school with Debbie, said that at recess, kids would send kickballs in her direction just to get an excuse to be near her.
Mark Montagne, 57, was captain of the Passaic Valley Hornets football team in 1984, which meant he had a personal cheerleader to pair with him: Debbie Kvam. “She really was that shining light,” he said. One of her jobs was to decorate her locker for game day. “There was something special at every game – balloons, stickers,” he recalled.
When Mr. Montney struggled in chemistry, Ms. Kavam shared her notes with him. “She always helped me pass the class,” he said.
After graduation, Ms. Kavam took classes at Montclair State College, partly in Little Falls, and Mr. Montaigne saw her around campus that first semester. But she soon left, and they lost touch before he graduated.
Cindy Certosimo Bowie had known Ms. Kavam since the third grade. At the age of 20, they became fast friends and travel partners.
“We went to Jamaica, Cancún, the Bahamas, Las Vegas,” Ms. Bowie said. “We’d go to clubs, hang out in the sun. When we got home we just booked another tour. It was like moving from place to place for three years.
Ms. Kavam was always working, Ms. Bowie said, although she rarely stayed in any one place for very long. “He shuffled around for a while,” said Ms. Bowie, 56, who now manages a school cafeteria. Ms. Kavam also worked at the headquarters of Sharp Electronics in Mahwah, among other jobs, Ms. Bowie recalled.
Ms Bowie said Ms Kwame sometimes had disagreements with her parents. “She was always going against the odds; He said white, she said black,” Ms. Bowie said. “Could have been age.” Ms. Kavam’s family declined to be interviewed for this article.
But eventually Ms. Bowie settled down and lost touch with her friend.
Details of Ms. Kavam’s life after that are difficult to find. At the age of 30, he worked for a few years as a customer service representative at the pharmaceutical company Merck. Around 2000, she began a relationship with a man who worked for an electric utility. According to the man’s ex-wife, they lived in a house along the Passaic River down the street from his childhood home. In 2003, Ms. Kwam legally changed her first name to Debrina.
The couple separated in 2008, around the same time the house went into foreclosure. By then, Ms. Kavam had not worked for some time and was beginning to get into trouble with the law due to alcohol. When he filed for bankruptcy that year, his entire assets included a Dodge Neon worth $800, a television and a futon worth $300, and some clothing.
Years after the Kavam family home in Little Falls was sold, Ms. Fraser and her husband said they met Ms. Kavam. Malcolm Fraser said she seemed “upset and shocked by something”.
Ms. Kavam 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 she described their previous relationship as chaotic.
Ms. Kavam spent a lot of time in Atlantic City, about an hour south, and court records show a series of summonses for public drinking from 2017 to last year.
Ms. Kavam’s mother also lived in Toms River. A neighbor said she did not know either of the women, but that someone of Ms. Kawam’s age had been visiting the house. The older woman led the younger one by the hand, as if she needed help getting around.
Last fall, Ms. Kavam came to New York, apparently with no place to live. On November 29, a homeless-outreach team encountered him at Grand Central Terminal. The next day, she checked into an intake shelter for women. Two days later, he was sent to a shelter in the Bronx. He never showed.
On the cool morning of December 22, as Ms. Kavam slept on the F train parked at the end of the line in Coney Island, a man approached her. Without saying anything, he threw the lighter at her. Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, saw her burning, police said. He has been accused of murder.
The news of Ms. Kavam’s passing and unexplained death left her classmates feeling devastated, empty and incomplete. “To be honest, I didn’t know his demons, the background of what was going on,” said Mr. Montaigne, a former football player. “If we only knew.”