BUFFALO - 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 second chances, that had driven her in 1989 to transform a rectory where a priest was viciously murdered into a halfway house for parolees - to turn the very room where he died into a chapel.

On Saturday, more than 1,500 mourners celebrated Klimczak's life, which ended in the violence she had fought against, at the hands, police said, of one of the ex-convicts she viewed as family.

Klimczak was strangled and beaten inside her room at the Bissonette House on Good Friday when she walked in on a resident as he was stealing her cell phone to trade for crack cocaine, police said.

Suspect Craig Lynch, 36, confessed and led police to her body Monday as 600 people were praying at a vigil for her safe return. She was 62.

At her funeral, mourners vowed to carry on her work.

“There is just too much violence in our community, not only what happened to Sister Karen ... We have to stop it,” Bishop Edward Kmiec of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo said inside St. Ann Church, where dove cutouts adorned every pew and pillar.

Sister Karen, as she was known, had “a kind of magnet in her heart” that drew her to minister to prison inmates and parolees more than 20 years ago, said Sister Elizabeth Savage, president of the Sisters of St. Joseph.

The Lackawanna-born Roman Catholic nun had experienced a more traditional religious life after professing her final vows in 1967. She taught at a private school, volunteered with children at camps, lived in the safety and stability of a convent.

But traditional she was not.

Not in the way she taught - she would become a clown named “Bounce,” with white face and multicolored hair, to teach children about kindness.

And not in the way she lived.

A year after visiting a state prison in 1984, she founded Hope House - Home of Positive Experiences - to help recently released prisoners transition into society. More than a job, it became her way of life.

The nun, who favored jeans, a sweat shirt and sneakers, lived at the house with her eight or nine charges, ate her meals with them, got up early each morning and prayed with them.

“This wasn't just a house. This was a home. They were part of her family,” said Sister Jean Klimczak, her biological sister who is also a nun.

Karen Klimczak moved Hope House into the former rectory of St. Bartholomew Church in 1989, two years after the Rev. A. Joseph Bissonette was killed there.

She changed the name of her ministry to Bissonette House in honor of the priest, who was bashed in the head with a can of food and stabbed in the heart as he made sandwiches for two teenagers who had knocked on his door, hungry, they said.

Klimczak visited her friend's killers in prison in 1995.

Antwan Diggs remained friends with Klimczak after spending eight months at Bissonette House upon his release from the Collins Correctional Facility in 1999.

He still volunteers his Friday and Saturday evenings at a youth center as a favor to Klimczak, though he said it would be impossible to repay her for what she did for him after he'd served time for robbery and drugs.

“I'm living in a mansion!” Diggs recalled telling his brother after arriving at the red brick house seven years ago and being greeted by Klimczak with clothes and shoes, his own room and a full refrigerator.

“When someone opens their house to you like that, most guys are not thinking about harming this lady,” Diggs, program coordinator of Buffalo's Weed and Seed initiative, said from his City Hall office. “You're thinking, ‘God has sent me an angel - and on top of that she's cooking me dinner.'

“It's like coming home to mom, and she's not mad at you for getting in trouble. She's just glad to see you,” he said.

If Klimczak was afraid for her safety in the poor and gritty Buffalo neighborhood, she did not show it. “She never complained,” said Ed Wiley, one of 100 volunteers who spent a day looking in trash bins and abandoned lots near the house when Klimczak was missing.