Kwantisha Klotzbach says her quiet neighborhood was anything but early Sunday morning and she says the opiate epidemic sweeping western New York is to blame.
“They had like the whole block shut down and there were like cops all over everywhere around, helicopters, it was crazy,” she says.
“It’s getting really bad out here all the drugs and everything out here it’s bad.”
According to police drugs are exactly what 24-year-old Adam Kibler was hoping he’d find when he walked into Eastern Niagara Hospital around 4:45 a.m. Saturday.
With two guns and what he claimed was a bomb, Kibler demanded drugs. Hospital officials say once he got the drugs he ran.
Although Adam Kibler was later captured by authorities and has been charged with robbery in the first degree, the situation hit too close to home for some Lockport residents.
“My daughter graduated with his brother and I believe my father knew his grandfather so that kind of thing,” Roseanne Stanley told 7 Eyewitness News.
She says she never would’ve of expected what transpired.
“Yeah, very unassuming people, nice. . . You just don’t expect that.”
But a close family friend who spoke to 7 Eyewitness News but declined to go on camera said as a young teen the suspect was treated by pain management physician Dr. Eugene Gosy. She continues to say he was “a very smart, funny, caring guy but that’s all shadowed by the cloud of addiction.”
Now, the young man described as funny and smart has a neighborhood living on edge.
