The homeless woman torched to death at a Brooklyn subway stop has been identified as a 57-year-old woman from New Jersey, officials said Tuesday.
Debrina Kawam of Toms River was set on fire as she slept in an F train stopped at the end of the line at Coney Island-Stillwell Ave. station about 7:30 a.m. Dec. 22. The homicide shocked the city and nation and set off a race to identify the body burned beyond recognition.
Mayor Adams said Tuesday that he knows little about her.
“No more than the name and that she resided in New Jersey,” Adams said. “She had a brief stint in our homeless shelter system, our shelter system. And your heart goes out to the family, a horrific incident to have to live through.”
A current resident at Kawam’s former home on Waterbury Court in Toms River spoke with the Daily News to share an odd encounter with the victim in May, saying Kawam appeared at the doorstep of the home and asked for her family — several weeks after they’d moved out.
“She said, ‘I’m Debrina. I’m the sister. I want to see my mother’,” the Toms River resident, who gave her name as Olga, told The News. “An older lady, she may have been mentally disabled.
“She gave me that vibe, because how could she not know that her family was living here? Something was wrong.”
Olga said she invited Kawam into her home and then called a real estate agent, hoping they could share a phone number for the woman’s family. The agent didn’t respond, and Kawam began rambling about not having a phone.
“She didn’t have a phone. She said, ‘No, I’ve gotta get one. I’ve gotta get one,’ ” Olga recounted.
According to police, Sebastian Zapeta, 33, was caught on camera sitting on a bench at the subway platform, watching the victim after she’d been set ablaze before he fled the scene.
“Just watching that tape, just really, I couldn’t even watch it all the way through,” Adams said Tuesday. “It was just a bad incident, and it impacts on how we all just feel. But it really reinforced what I’ve been saying. People should not be living on our subway system. They should be in a place of care. And no matter where she lived, that should not have happened.”
Kawam’s body was so badly burned that investigators could not initially raise her fingerprints. They eventually managed to do so, and that led to being able to identify her and notify next of kin, police sources said.
Detectives also scoured the subway system looking for video to learn where and when Kawam stepped onto the F train, officials said.
When a body cannot be visually confirmed, the city medical examiner’s office takes fingerprints and shares them with law enforcement. The NYPD did an extensive search, found a possible match and sent the fingerprints that cops believed were a match to the medical examiner’s office to compare and confirm, sources said.
Kawam graduated from Passaic Valley Regional High School in 1985. In her yearbook entry, Kawam said her ambition was to become an airline stewardess, and that her “secret ambition” was “to party forever.” She was a cheerleader during her freshman and sophomore years, according to the yearbook. Her classmates voted her “most punk.”
At some point Kawam’s life appeared to have taken a downturn. She filed for bankruptcy in 2008, writing, “I haven’t worked due to illness,” according to the filing.
She has no criminal history in New York City but had been arrested nine times in Atlantic City between Sept. 18, 2017, and Nov. 6, 2023, mostly for drinking in public and sleeping in the street, New Jersey records show.
She relocated to New York City shortly after her last arrest and was given a summons in April 2024, but it was not immediately disclosed what the summons was for.
Zapeta is a Guatemalan migrant who was living in a Brooklyn men’s shelter before his arrest.
“People should not be sleeping on subways and on streets of the city of New York, and we should not wait until they commit a crime like burning an innocent person or shoving someone on the subway before we say we have a problem,” Adams said Tuesday at his weekly press briefing, which he opened by touting how safe the city had become under his administration.
Zapeta is accused of setting Kawam on fire with a lighter and then “fanning the fire using a shirt,” Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Ari Rottenberg said at his arraignment, where he was ordered held without bail.
“The deceased became entirely engulfed in flames,” Rottenberg said. “The defendant then stepped out of the train onto a platform and continued fanning the flames with a shirt.”
Zapeta then threw the shirt to the ground and sat down on a bench on the subway platform to watch his deadly handiwork, prosecutors say.
Horrifying video shows the suspect sitting on the bench calmly watching as the flames engulfed the woman, who got to her feet and was standing helplessly near the subway car’s open door.
A grand jury last week voted to charge Zapeta with first-degree murder, meaning he is facing life without parole if convicted for the disturbing caught-on-camera killing.
With Colin Mixson and Roni Jacobson
