Before she was Debrina, she was Debbie.
In her town of Little Falls, New Jersey, Debbie Khawam was the girl people wanted to be around. A cheerleader with an inner glow, she was seen high-fiving in the hallways of Passaic Valley Regional High School, cruising with friends and posing against the park. A hostess uniform welcomes guests at Perkins Pancake House with a Led Zeppelin poster in the background.
By his 20s, Khawam was the life of the party, jetting off to Las Vegas and the Caribbean with his girlfriend and living in the moment.
What followed would be years and then decades of dark times. Then, on Dec. 22, Khawam was set on fire in a Brooklyn subway and attacked, apparently at random, in harrowing footage. For nine days, the woman's death remained anonymous. The grieving may begin after her body is identified on Tuesday.
When her adopted name, “Deblina,” was heard on the news, her classmates scoured their memories to erase the indelible image of a person outlined in flames.
“He was very sweet and kind,” said Diane Risoldi, 57, a former pancake house colleague who helped Khawam find work. “I can still see her in a black skirt and pink button-down, always smiling.”
“She looked like a girl who was going to have it all,” Susan Fraser said.
Khawam, 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. Malcolm Fraser, Susan's husband and a childhood friend of Khawam's, said Susan's mother worked in a bakery. She had a brother and a sister.
Joe Rocco, who often walked home from school with Debbie, said his children would throw kickballs in her direction during recess just to have an excuse to be near Debbie.
Mark Montene, 57, was captain of the Passaic Valley Hornets football team in 1984. I mean, he had a personal cheerleader to pair with, Debbie Khawam. “She was such a bright light,” he said. One of her jobs was to decorate his locker on game days. “Every game had something special, like balloons or stickers,” he recalled.
When Montein struggled in chemistry, Khawam shared his notes with her. “She always helped me pass my classes,” he said.
After graduation, Khawam took classes a few towns away at Montclair State University, and Montane saw her on campus during her first semester. However, she soon left and they lost touch before he graduated.
Cindy Certosimo Bowie has known Mr. Khawam since they were in third grade. In their twenties, they quickly became friends and traveling partners.
“We went to Jamaica, Cancun, the Bahamas and Las Vegas,” Bowie said. “We'd go to clubs and lie in the sun. When we got home, we'd just book another trip. It was like we spent three years going from place to place. .”
Bowie said Khawam was always working, but rarely in the same place for long periods of time. “She seems to have adjusted her work for a while,” said Bowie, 56, who now manages the school's cafeteria. Bowie recalled that Khawam worked at Sharp Electronics' headquarters in Mahwah and elsewhere.
Bowie said Khawam was sometimes at odds with his parents. “She always defied the odds. They said she was white, she said she was black,” Bowie said. “It may also be due to age.'' Khawam's family declined to be interviewed for this article.
But eventually Bowie calmed down and she lost contact with her friend.
Details of Khawam's life after that are difficult to find. In her 30s, she worked for several years as a customer service representative for the pharmaceutical company Merck. Around 2000, she started dating a man who worked for an electric power company. The man's ex-wife said the two lived in a house on the Passaic River, down the street from his childhood home. In 2003, Khawam legally changed her name to Deblina.
The couple separated in 2008, around the time their home went into foreclosure. By that time, Mr. Khawam had not worked for some time and was having trouble with the law due to alcohol. When she filed for bankruptcy that year, her total assets were a Dodge Neon valued at $800, a television and futon valued at $300, and several items of clothing.
A few years after the Khawam home in Little Falls was sold, Fraser said she and her husband met Khawam by chance. Malcolm Fraser said she “appeared to be distraught and excited about something”.
Mr. Khawam spent most of the last decade of his life in the southern part of the state. She lived with a man in Toms River for several years. The man later married another man, but the widow said he had described his previous relationship as chaotic.
Khawam spends a lot of time in Atlantic City, about an hour south, and has been issued a series of citations for public drinking between 2017 and last year, according to court records.
Khawam's mother also lived in Toms River. Neighbors said they didn't know either woman, but someone around Khawam's age had been coming in and out of the house. The older woman was holding the younger woman's hand as if she needed help getting around.
This fall, Khawam came to New York, but apparently couldn't find a place to stay. On November 29, a homeless assistance team encountered her at Grand Central Terminal. The next day, she checked into a women's shelter. Two days later, she was assigned to a shelter in the Bronx. She never showed.
In the frigid early morning of Dec. 22, Khawam was sleeping on the F train at the end of Coney Island when a man approached her. He pointed the lighter at her without saying anything. Police said the man, Sebastian Zapeta Khalil, 33, then watched her burn. He is charged with murder.
Upon hearing the news of Mr. Khawam's descent and unspeakable death, his classmates were left feeling devastated, empty and unfinished. “Honestly, I didn't know about her demons or what was going on or the background behind it,” said Montein, a former football player. “If only I knew.”
