The pebble was tossed when a middle-school student in upstate New York posted a 10-minute video on his Facebook page.
The video, showing four seventh-grade boys cruelly taunting 68-year-old bus monitor Karen Klein, was uploaded to YouTube. And the ripples began.
Millions of viewers from around the world watched her humiliation. There were cries of indignation and sympathy, retribution and recompense. Through posts on social media and the user-generated news site , word spread geometrically, leading to a fund drive that began with a modest goal of $5,000 to help Klein take a nice vacation.
By Friday, the drive had sailed past $560,000, with donations from more than 24,000 people.
Even in a connected, fast-moving world, the response to Klein’s plight is stunning.
“Oh, my God,” Klein said Thursday. She said it was “weird, very weird” to be an international celebrity and joked she would have to go out in public disguised by a wig and dark glasses.
“I appreciate everything so much,” she said. “It’s just hard to believe strangers, people I never talked to, never seen, will send me a message saying, ‘We love you, we think you’re a great person.’ “
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project and author of “Networked: The New Social Operating System,” said the sheer volume of the response to the Klein video “head-scratching.”
“It kind of feels like there aren’t boundaries to this stuff,” Rainie said.
The verbal abuse was captured in a cellphone video recorded Monday by a student of Athena Middle School in the Rochester suburb of Greece. The video shows Klein trying 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.
Police in the Rochester suburb of Greece, N.Y., stepped up patrols around the houses of the middle-schoolers accused of taunting her. Police didn’t name the boys, but their purported identities leaked on the Web. At least one received death threats.
Klein asked people to leave the boys alone. “Threatening them? No. That’s not the way to go about things,” she said. “They’re just kids.”
Online: Watch the video.
