Remembering Debrina Kawam: Woman Set On Fire On F Train By Migrant Was Homeless, Burned Alive With No One To Help
Debrina Kawam is a woman from Little Falls and Tom’s River in New Jersey. She had formerly worked at pharmaceutical company Merck. The company is a fixture in the area similar to Johnson and Johnson, both of which employ many people in various capacities. She also attended Montclair State University. She was popular in high school, and even helped the captain of the football team bring his grades up. It is unclear how she disconnected from her friends and family networks, but several weeks ago her life ended tragically on a train she had been taking shelter on from the cold.
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa took the time to learn more about this woman who did not start out homeless, did not grow up in poverty or a broken or abusive home, and ended up with no one and nothing, possibly abused in a rough urban shelter.
The migrant, who had been deported back in 2018, had been drinking heavily, and when he was confronted by police, said he didn’t remember the incident, which was caught on surveillance. Allegedly, he said, “oh, damn, that’s me,” when shown the video in which the woman is lit on fire by someone alleged to be him.
According to Fox 5 NY:
Authorities described Zapeta as reacting with “disgust” and “strangeness” to the video, wiping his eyes and exclaiming in Spanish, “Oh, my goodness,” according to the transcript.
“I am very sorry. I didn’t mean to,” he then told detectives. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m very sorry for that woman.”
Fox 5 also reported that before the woman’s identity was known, local faith and community leaders came held a vigil in her honor at the subway station where she was killed. CNN stated that police had difficulty putting out the flames, though the reason why was not mentioned.
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa learned as much as possible about Debrina Kawam. He shared the following on his WABC77 broadcast:
“…yet for Debrina’s mom she had nothing, and so I say to you as was said if you remember in the State of the Union Address, as Joe Biden was stumbling and mumbling, Marjorie Taylor Green [the] Republican from Georgia screamed out at him, “Say her name, say her name Laken Riley, and he eventually did and he said the illegal alien killed her, and then later he amended that.
You remember that? Who, who knows the name of this woman that was turned into a human torch we don’t hear anything more about?
It’s almost like it’s out of sight, out of mind because she was homeless we don’t know want to know the details, and emotionally disturbed – we don’t want to know the details. Let’s be honest. We know it was a horrific crime.
It will live in infamy. It is emblazoned in our mindset.
We can never forget that, and she grabbed the railing and was a Human Torch, and nobody helped her. Nobody on the platform, none of the cops, in fact nobody on the platform even pointed to the monster who had just been Fanning the Flames making the Flames worse, who sat like a pyromaniac and watched his dastardly deed in front [of] everybody, took the code of omera, and all they wanted to do is film it and that they did, but she is a woman with the background that needs to be aired out.
We live in a city, The Naked City, used to be a show, and I was going up [and] said the Naked City is a story [that] has a thousand stories, and hers was just one of many.
I in my efforts as the leader of the Guardian Angels, I’ve gotten to know a lot of homeless people, a lot of emotionally disturbed persons, and I spent the time to find out who they are, and you would be surprised you would be surprised how normal at one time they were, and how sometimes a situation or two triggered them to the point where they ended up crawling into the belly of the Beast, which is what the Subways is nowadays.
If you had seen me earlier on Fox and Friends with Brian Killme, I said the Subway has never been worse. [I]t’s dangerous for everyone, and that, that went virally all over the world because I am considered the expert on subway, the expert on crime.
I’ve earned that over 46 years, but I want to tell you about this this woman that nobody seems to want to talk about. The media is really not giving information, and I hope we here at WABC, now that we know who she, is we’ll do a commemoration. We’ll memorialize her at that spot.
Everybody needs to know the trauma that occurred at that spot, not only to her but to all of us because the D Penny effect kicked in, [and] everybody was paralyzed. Nobody wanted to get involved, including the cops.
Who is Debrina, better known originally as Debbie Kawam? She was a Jersey girl like so many of you listening. You have daughters who are like her grandchildren, who are like her.
You may have been like her growing up as she did in Tom’s River and Little Falls. She was in a White House single family house on a block of single family homes.
Her father worked the assembly line of the Linden General Motors plant off 1&9 in Linden. Her mother worked in a bakery shop.
There appeared to be no problems of dysfunction in that household, in fact, Debbie, as she was called in elementary school, junior high school, and high school, Kawam had an inner glow. According to her fellow students, she high-fived them in the hallways. She was a cheerleader at Passaic Valley Regional High School. Everybody loved Debbie. The teachers loved Debbie. Those that worked at the school. She just she had an effervescent glow, and all the boys wanted to talk to Debbie, but they were afraid to because they felt they weren’t worthy of it, and they would hope that Debbie… Debbie might just glance at them or maybe have a conversation with them, and they were mumbling and stumbling because she was the girl that everybody wanted to be with.
The captain of the football team embraced her because Debbie was a cheerleader, and the tradition of Passaic Valley Regional High School was that whichever cheerleader was assigned to one of the football players, they would decorate their lockers for homecoming.
And she did an outstanding job, and while she was decorating, the captain of the football team confided in her, and said: look they may kick me off the team. My math, my science scores are miserable, and she said don’t worry about it. I do good in in math and science. I’ll tutor you, and we need you to be on the football team. We need you to be captain of the football team, and he attributes him being able to stay on the football team and being able to play to the time that she spent caring about him.
And like so many students who are not coming from wealth, again, bluecollar working class gal from a blue collar working class family. She worked after school at Perkins Pancake House where she was the hostess, and she got a lot of the other High School gals and guys jobs there because everybody loved Debbie at Perkins, and then she would continue to work. She was the life of the party but never excessive. She wasn’t known as a druggie. She wasn’t known as somebody who would just drink too much and couldn’t have self-control. She went to nearby Monclair State College in Little Falls and kept it very close to home. She wanted to be in Little falls. She wanted to be in Toms River.
She loved that location, and now once she left Monclair State College she began to work a regular job, to remain friends with her girlfriends from her days at Passaic Valley Regional High School, and they had a routine every 3 months they would go to a different location and party for that weekend.
Miami Beach, Las Vegas, the West Indies, the Caribbean. Everybody wanted to be with Debbie. All the boys loved Debbie. There’s nothing negative to say about her. Everybody said Debbie Kawam was so sweet, and she was such a kind worker. She seemed like a girl who is going to have everything in her life…
So now, now her work schedule continued. She got a job at Sharp Electric in Mahwah near the border with Rockland and then a pharmaceutical company, Merck, which is like institutional in New Jersey, and she was doing well.
And she met a guy and they set up a household right near the Passaic River just a few blocks from where she grew up in Little Falls, and in Tom’s River she wanted to stay local. She [was] just a local Hometown girl. She was a Jersey girl like so many who are listening now. Like so many of your daughters and your granddaughters, no different, but she had a series of troubled relationships in which she didn’t work out with the guy. So she went to Atlantic City to work figuring I’ll leave this area. I’ll meet new people in Atlantic City. [She] got a job in one of the casinos apparently, and unfortunately had to declare bankruptcy, and then she began to slide. It was a personal slide. She no longer remained in contact with family and friends that she had known in Little Falls.
Back then it wasn’t a question of Facebook updates and all that. She just all of a sudden, she disconnected herself, and she was seen from time to time in many of the Jersey short towns like Seaside Heights, and she would get caught by the police excessively drinking, and they’d write her up and they’d give her a citation, and so you could actually track her movements as she started moving North from Atlantic City but always close to the shore. [She] seemed to have a problem with alcohol and drugs.
She was seen from time to time to be slightly disheveled, but always seemed to have a place where she could rest her head. She wasn’t homeless yet, and as she began to self-destruct, she probably began to realize that she was losing it. This beautiful woman, this Jersey Girl. Debbie Kawam decided it was time to come home. She had to reconnect and she wanted to see her mommy so she worked her way back to Tom’s River to the house that she had grown up in.
Remember how I described that White House on a block of single family houses. She knocked on the door. A woman named Olga answered, and said how can I be of help. Is my mother here? Is my mother here? And then she said the name, and [she] said, oh, we just bought the house from your mother and father two months ago. Do you have a phone? Can you can you contact her? She said no, I don’t have a phone, I want my mommy. She said, just just wait right here, I’m going to call the realtor. I’m sure the realtor knows where they moved to, and when Olga came back to the front door…
Now, now, Debrina, who had changed her name in the last few years to Kawam, was crying uncontrollably. Walking down the block crying out the name of her mother. She ended up making her way to Grand Central Station where homeless outreach workers found her, and instead of finding out who she is, she’s a Jersey girl. She lived in a Suburban Town.
She’s not an urban girl. They decided, we’re going to send her to a woman’s shelter in the South Bronx. I know that shelter. It’s a tough shelter, and I know what happened to her in that shelter. They probably abused her, took her personal items, found out she was from Jersey, and, oh, it’s probably hell, and the last thing they knew she left.
And then she was on that F train going round and round and round, and then she was set up like a human torch. So say her name wherever you go. Debrina Kawam because for about 10 days we didn’t know who she was. We don’t know if she’ll be buried in Hart Island Potter’s Field where a million Anonymous people have been buried.
Poor, impoverished, or those who had disconnected from their families. We now know who she is, and let me just tell you from my 46 years of experience on the subways: there are thousands of those similar stories amongst the homeless and the emotionally disturbed that we’d rather not deal with. I’m hoping that we will take the lead here at WABC, and we will commemorate her, and we will memorialize her because we can never forget Debrina Kawam. It’s a stain on our soul in New York City because nobody helped her, and the last thing she wanted like we all do when it’s time for us to pass: we cry out for our mothers. Mommy. She was saying mommy, mommy.”

Prayer vigil at subway station. Image Credit – FOX 5
Statement from the Coalition for the Homeless on the murder of the homeless woman set on fire on the subway
This horrible and senseless murder of a homeless woman yet again underscores how badly our City and State have failed in addressing the inexcusable lack of affordable housing that relegates so many members of our community to homelessness, and how vulnerable people are when left to sleep in public spaces. It’s easy to forget that homeless individuals are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crime. But tragedies like this – occurring only days after the Homeless Persons Memorial Day, and shortly after the Daniel Penny acquittal, which underscored how little our city values the lives of people without homes – are a devastating reminder of that fact.
The New York Times also published a detailed story of her life: Subway Victim’s Brutal End Stuns Friends From Her Happy Past In it you can learn more about her life from friends of hers in her hometown.
Banner Image: F train pulling into station Image Credit – Monty Magin
I always thought Curtis Sliwa was a Puerto Rican and Polish New Yorker.
I think I was only half right.
He’s still a Boriqua to me.
I was shocked to find it is Italian and Polish.
The homeless do drugs like K2 Spice Tranx and Vampire