SUNDERLAND — Jana Abromowitz loved to express herself through art and music, had deep empathy for the oppressed and vulnerable, and had a limitless future in sight, loved ones recalled two days after the 21-year-old was found stabbed to death in her Northampton apartment.
About a dozen friends gathered at the self-directed learning center North Star at 45 Amherst Road on Tuesday afternoon to grieve together and reflect on the joy that Abromowitz, who attended the program from 2015 to 2020, brought to their lives. A second gathering was held in the evening.
“Honestly, she was, like, everything to me,” Fares Croteau, a North Star alumnus, said in an interview. “I was there for her and she was there for me.”
After the afternoon gathering, some stayed behind to leaf through a stack of photos of Abromowitz that a staff member had printed out and planned to hang around the room. One photo showed Abromowitz, with a bright smile, marching in a rain-soaked Northampton pride parade carrying a rainbow flag.
“She didn’t have a mean bone in her body,” friend Connor Bulseco said. “I feel like anyone that got close to her, all of us that remember her, would say that she was one of the kindest people you’d ever met.”
Devin Bryden, 24, is charged with murder and larceny of a motor vehicle in connection with Abromowitz’s death. Northampton police allege in court records that Bryden told them he had planned the killing because he was about to become homeless and he wanted to steal Abromowitz’s car.
The two shared a supportive housing unit at 11 Hatfield St. that is run by the DIAL/SELF Youth & Community Services program for at-risk young people ages 18-24.
According to the Northwestern district attorney’s office, police were called to the apartment at around 6 p.m. Sunday and found Abromowitz dead in the kitchen. She had suffered blunt force trauma and stab wounds, investigators said. Hours later, police found Bryden in the victim’s car in a Westfield parking lot.
Bryden was arraigned in Northampton District Court Monday. He is being held without bail until at least his next court appearance on Aug. 10.
Adopted from Bulgaria at age 14, Abromowitz arrived at North Star in 2015 speaking very little English, friends and staff recalled, but early in her second-language education, she decided to learn Spanish, too. During her time at the school alternative, she blossomed creatively, channeling her difficult life experiences and her caring nature into singing and guitar, and forming a band with three friends called Tropical Hot Sauce that played live shows in the area.
“I like that we all had different tastes in music. Jana definitely had more of a pop contribution,” bandmate Sabrina Raimondi said. “I just remember one song that stuck out to me. She wrote a song called ‘Woman’ because, I could tell, she was very passionate about feminism, and I love that song.”
Croteau, who was in that band as well, described Abromowitz as an “energetic” frontwoman and a “genuine and humble” person. The band’s fourth member, Jason Lee, said her voice was “chilling” and “powerful.”
Abromowitz performed the vocals on two songs for the North Star band’s 2017 album “Electric Love.” One song was the album’s title track, sung in English, and the other is called “Habibi,” sung in her native Bulgarian.
John Sprague, a staff member at North Star, said Abromowitz had shifted her focus from music to work during the COVID-19 pandemic and became manager of the Burger King restaurant on King Street in Northampton.
Staff member Ellen Morbyrne said Abromowitz befriended her children and felt particular empathy for younger people because of her experiences at an orphanage in Bulgaria.
“Her resilience was deep because it was real,” Morbyrne said. “She was not just Bulgarian, she was also Roma, which is a big political issue, that there are a lot of Roma kids in Bulgarian orphanages. … She had a lot of wheels to grease to navigate a very difficult life.”
In a social media post, Abromowitz’s adoptive mother Jennifer Abromowitz said the “special memories” of her daughter “are the gifts I hope we all choose to focus on.”
“It would be so easy to go under in grief, rage and despair by this senseless act. But Jana’s whole life was spent in overcoming trauma, grief, and rage,” the post reads. “Her wonderful, vibrant, funny, talented, irreverent, compassionate, imperfect, courageous, caring, joyous, hard-working, determined, spirited nature was the result.”
She appealed for donations in her daughter’s memory to be made to North Star, The Institute for the Musical Arts (IMA) and Adoption Journeys in Florence.