Bullied bus monitor Karen Klein: Donations mount to $400k-plus

Bullied bus monitor Karen Klein, who was nastily bullied by middle schoolers earlier this week, has received more that $443,000 in donations from around the world. Three of the students have issued written apologies as of Thursday night.

By Chris Carola,?Associated Press, Michael Hill,?Associated Press / June 22, 2012

Bus monitor Karen Klein, of Greece, N.Y., talked on Wednesday about being bullied by Greece middle school students while she was school bus monitor. The incident was captured on video and posted to YouTube where it went viral. People from around the world have contributed more that $443,000 in donations for Klein.

Jamie Germano/Democrat & Chronicle/AP

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A video of four seventh-grade boys mercilessly taunting a 68-year-old bus?monitor in New York state that went viral has turned the victim into an international fundraising juggernaut and opened her tormentors to an onslaught of threats and abuse.

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From around the world, small donations for Karen Klein poured into the crowd-funding site indiegogo.com, at one point crashing the site and pulling in a staggering $443,057 (?349,689) by early Friday.

At the same time, police in the Rochester suburb of Greece, N.Y., were stepping up patrols around the houses of the middle-schoolers accused of taunting her. Police didn't name the boys but their purported identities leaked out on the Web.

Greece Police Capt. Steve Chatterton was compelled to warn against vigilante justice. One boy received more than a thousand death threats and commenters online were clear ? and sometimes venomous ? in their desire that the boys be severely punished.

"A threat for a threat does not make the situation better," Chatterton said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

The verbal abuse was captured in a 10-minute cellphone video recorded Monday by a student of Athena Middle School and later posted to YouTube. The video shows Klein trying her best to ignore the stream of profanity, insults and outright threats. One student taunted: "You don't have a family because they all killed themselves because they don't want to be near you."

Klein's oldest son killed himself 10 years ago.

Eventually, she appears to break down in tears.

The swell of support for Klein follows a recent surge in awareness of bullying that has brought the issue from the classroom to the stage and screen to the White House. Bullying expert Stephen Birchak, a professor of counseling at Albany's College of Saint Rose, said the enormous flow of money for Klein is no surprise given the shame we feel as a society over the incident.

The stickier question is: How could the students be so cruel?

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