PHILADELPHIA—Alfred Klosterman heard the pop-pop-pop of at least a dozen rounds on the April evening when two of his neighbors, a woman and her 5-year-old son, were shot inside their home around 8:30 p.m., struck by gunfire that erupted on Venango Street in this city’s Harrowgate neighborhood. Neither was targeted, police say, and both survived.
Minutes after the barrage, which he felt sure was yet another spasm of drug-related violence, Mr. Klosterman dashed off an emotional email from his two-story row house. “I sat here shaking. This HAS to end,” he wrote Noëlle Foizen, the city official leading Philadelphia’s opioid crisis response. Replying quickly, she offered to call him and link him with trauma services, writing, “I am so sorry—that sounds terrifying and no one should live like this.”
In a Crime-Laden Corner of Philadelphia, Residents Fight to Reclaim Their Streets
