By Associated Press
Buffalo, NY – Whenever the blood of violence stained a city sidewalk or street, Sister Karen Klimczak would soon be there, not to condemn the place, but to claim it. She would lead a peace vigil, plant a sign with a dove that read, "Nonviolence begins with me."
It was that determination to turn bad into good, a belief in redemption, that had driven her in 1989 to transform a Buffalo rectory where a priest was viciously murdered into a halfway house for parolees -- to turn the very room where he died into a chapel.
Saturday, more than 15-hundred mourners celebrated Klimczak's life.
Police say the 62-year-old Klimczak was strangled and beaten inside her room at the Bissonette House on Good Friday when she walked in on resident Craig Lynch as he was stealing her cell phone to trade for crack cocaine.
At her funeral inside Saint Ann Church, where dove cutouts adorned every pew and pillar, mourners vowed to carry on her work.