As we discussed yesterday, a school bus aid from Greece, New York, was maliciously bullied by the students on the bus. All of the verbal abuse was captured on video and was posted to YouTube, garnering over 3 million views as of Friday morning and outrage from across the country. A campaign was started on the site Indiegogo.com asking people to donate money so the aid, Karen Klein, could take a vacation.
As of Friday morning, the donations totaled over $440,000 for Klein, who has discussed the bullying incident in various interviews. Two of the boys involved in the incident issued apologies via statements, which were read by Anderson Cooper on CNN’s ‘Anderson 360.’
“I feel really bad about what I did,” Wesley, one of the boys from the video, said in a statement. “I wish I had never done those things. If that had happened to someone in my family, like my mother or grandmother, I would be really mad at the people who did that to them.”
“I am so sorry for the way I treated you,” Josh, another boy from the video, said in a statement. “When I saw the video I was disgusted and could not believe I did that. I am sorry for being so mean and I will never treat anyone this way again.”
When Klein was asked if she felt that the boys were bad children, she responded quite surprisingly.
“Not really, not deep down,” Klein told Cooper. Cooper announced on his show that Southwest Airlines offered to fly Klein and nine people to Disneyland free of charge.