The four survivors of a plane crash in central Idaho can prove just how close they came to death on June 30, with a seven-minute video documenting their harrowing experience, including the bloody aftermath.

The video, which has gone viral online, was captured by two cameras, and posted weeks after the ordeal so the men's friends and family could see what happened. 

One passenger, Nathan Williams, 38, told The Associated Press on Thursday that he and his friends are "just four guys who are lucky to be alive." 

The dramatic footage shows the plane taking off from a dirt runway in the Bear Valley area, where the men had spent the day hiking in the wilderness. Williams said they were headed to McCall for dinner.

About 2 minutes and 40 seconds into the video, the plane begins to lower and then crashes into trees. As the shot becomes blocked by the wreckage, a man is heard asking, "Everybody OK?"

"Within five seconds we're on the ground, upside down, hanging from our seat belts," passenger Tol Gropp, the pilot's son, said.

He and another passenger, Alec Arhets, escaped with cuts and bruises. Williams suffered a concussion, while the pilot, Les Gropp, 70, had a broken jaw, broken ribs and a fractured cheekbone. 

NBC News

One passenger, Nathan Williams, 38, said he and his friends are "just four guys who are lucky to be alive."

He is expected to make a full recovery.

"You certainly feel like we were watched over that day," Tal Gropp said, adding that his father is credited with grounding the plane without loss of life.

Several minutes later, one of the men is shown retrieving the camera, which films the pilot lying on the ground with his head resting on a log and his face and arm covered in blood. His eye appears blackened and the wreckage of the Stinson 108-3 is in the background.

The men suspect the plane had a difficult time gaining altitude because of warming temperatures. They think it may have hit an air pocket that made it rapidly lose altitude, pushing it down into the trees.

"The first time you see it it's kind of surreal because it's full speed, you know, it's seven seconds, it's not very much time," Tal Gropp said. "Probably watched it a couple of hundred times." 

As of Friday morning, the video of the plane crash had more than 370,000 views and had been played more than 1.3 million times on the website LiveLeak, where it was shared two day ago. [Editor's note: The video contains graphic images some viewers might find disturbing.]

Williams told the AP he understands why people are intrigued, while Tal Gropp muses: "It's surreal that I was actually one of the people in the plane."

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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A city bus driver says he was thinking of his own young daughter when he rushed to catch a 7-year-old girl plunging three stories from a New York building Monday – an action caught on video.

"Please let me catch her, please let me catch her," Stephen St. Bernard, 52, recalled thinking. "That's all I could say. Let me catch the little baby."

"I think about my daughter, and you know, she's a little kid," he said.

St. Bernard, an MTA bus driver of 10 years, was returning home to Coney Island from his job at about 2 p.m. when he heard screams coming from a building courtyard.

He rushed toward the commotion and saw a girl standing on top of a third-floor window air conditioning unit. He immediately ran underneath the window.

"She just stood up there teetering, teetering," he said.

See the original story at NBCNewYork.com

Amateur video shows St. Bernard shouting up to the girl, trying to talk the girl into going back into her apartment. Suddenly, the girl falls, eliciting horrified screams from neighbors.

But St. Bernard catches her in his arms, stumbling slightly forward to the ground with the girl still firmly in his grasp.

"I picked her up and carried her, and I was holding her, rubbing her, and she just more or less kept looking around," he told NBC 4 New York. "She never closed her eyes, she didn't lose consciousness."

The girl was not wearing pants, and St. Bernard wrapped her in his MTA uniform shirt as he waited for paramedics to arrive.

She was taken to Coney Island Hospital with very minor injuries.

"He's my hero," said the girl's aunt, Monique Harding. "He definitely did our family a favor today."

Police sources said the girl has autism. Her mother was inside the apartment watching her other child and did not see the girl standing outside on the A/C, the sources said.

St. Bernard sustained a torn tendon in his shoulder but he is expected to be OK.

The girl's mother did not want to speak with reporters Monday.

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AP

In this image taken from AP video, bus monitor Karen Klein speaks during an interview June 21.

One-year school suspensions were handed down Friday to four seventh-graders who were accused of bullying a bus monitor in Greece, N.Y.,  in a case that led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to the 68-year-old woman.

The Greece Central School District said the four boys and their parents agreed to the punishment, NBC station WHEC of Rochester reported.

The bullying was captured on video, posted on the Internet and triggered widespread outrage, but was followed by an effort to raise a little money to send Karen Klein on a nice vacation. That might turn out to be a real nice vacation: By Friday afternoon, the “Lets Give Karen – The bus monitor – H Klein A Vacation!” campaign on Indiegogo.com, a site devoted to raising money for various causes, had raised $667,000.

"This is definitely the highest-grossing and fastest-grossing campaign we've ever seen," Indiegogo.com spokesperson Rose Levy told msnbc.com last week.

WHEC reported that during the one-year suspension, each student will attend an alternative program at the district’s reengagement center. They will also be required to complete 50 hours of community service with senior citizens and will also have to complete a formal program in bullying prevention, respect and responsibility. 

Donations for bullied bus monitor soar 

The YouTube video that started it all emerged in the middle of last week. It goes on for 10 minutes and shows the four boys repeatedly harassing Klein on the last day of school. 

All four students have since sent written apologies to Klein through the Greece Police Department. Klein has also met with some of their parents, but not the boys themselves.

This article includes reporting from NBC station WHEC of Rochester, N.Y., and msnbc.com staff.

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A Connecticut mother is accused of abusing her 10-month-old baby and videorecording the incidents.

Police in West Haven, Conn., arrested Kellie Park, 20, last week after the baby’s father contacted authorities saying she texted him videos of her tormenting, berating and assaulting the infant, according to a police report.

In one video, Park is heard telling the baby to “eat stuff off the floor, this is what your dad wants me to do,” police said.

West Haven Police

Kellie Park is accused of tormenting her 10-month-old child and videotaping the incidents.

In another, the baby is seen screaming and crying in a high chair as Park asks if the infant is hungry, while throwing food at the child. Police say Park can be seen taking the baby from the high chair and putting the infant in a portable crib and shaking the crib, causing the child to fall out. She can be heard saying “shake it up” on the video.

Park was arrested June 20 and charged with third-degree assault, cruelty to persons, risk of injury and threatening.

Police said Park also sent separate text messages to the father.

The texts included “ill (expletive) break her face,” “ill beat her (expletive) face in” and “i love abusing this kid,” police said.

After seeing the videos and texts, West Haven detectives immediately took custody of the child, who was transported to a hospital for evaluation and then taken into care by the Department of Children and Families in Hartford, Conn.

In a statement to msnbc.com, DCF Commissioner Joette Katz said, "We are actively investigating this matter, and the child is no longer in the mother's care. In addition, we are working with the police in pursuit of this case."

DCF spokesman Gary Kleeblatt told msnbc.com that the first step when taking any child into their care is to determine if there is an appropriate relative to care for the child.

“If a parent is unable to care for a child safely, then we would look to see if another relative like the father or grandmother is appropriate,” Kleeblatt said. “If that’s not possible, we’ll look to see if we can identify a licensed foster home.” 

Officers had been called to Park's address earlier in the day because she attempted to kill herself, according to the police report.

Park is being held in lieu of $50,000 bail and is due back in court July 11. 

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Updated 10:30 a.m. Thursday ET: Karen Klein, a school bus monitor of Greece, N.Y., depicted being verbally bullied in a video gone viral, may have the last laugh.

By mid-morning Thursday on the fund-raising site indiegogo.com, nearly 8,000 donors had pledged more than $150,000 in a campaign called “Lets Give Karen – The bus monitor – H Klein A Vacation.”

The fund-raising was set up through a reddit.com member, identified as Max Sidorov of Toronto, Canada.

An Indiegogo spokesperson told msnbc.com that the website was in touch with Klein, who will receive all the money raised through its site when the campaign is over, scheduled July 20.

Karen Klein talks to Matt Lauer on TODAY

A video called "Making the Bus Monitor Cry" was posted to YouTube on Monday and had been seen by more than 100,000 viewers by Wednesday evening. The video shows students yelling at Klein and making fun of her weight and other physical conditions.

Graphic content warning: The video on YouTube 

NBC television station WHEC of Rochester, N.Y., on Wednesday confirmed with the Greece School District that Klein was the subject of the middle school students’ heckling.

An outpouring of support for Klein emerged after her identity became known.

While WHEC was interviewing Klein, the station reported, people were stopping over and flowers were being delivered.

Klein said she still can’t believe this happened. The video was taken by a student who is always very kind to her, she said.

“It’s just plain mean, and no one should have to live with that,” she said.

In her 20-plus years as a bus driver and monitor with the Greece Central Schools, Klein said she has never run into this kind of behavior.

See the original story at WHEC.com

“Everything started out as usual. I don’t know what happened,” she said.

Klein said the four kids in the video often misbehave, but what happened Monday was taking things to a whole new level.

Greece police and school district officials are investigating three videos, including the one titled "Making the Bus Monitor Cry." 

Debra Hoeft, Greece School District, said, “We do not tolerate harassment of staff or students. While we can not comment on specific student discipline, we can say that students found to be involved will face strong disciplinary actions.”

In one of the videos, the kids are calling her names, swearing at her and even making physical threats. Klein doesn’t say much to the middle schoolers.

“I was trying to just ignore,” Klein said. “I’m hoping they would go away, but it doesn’t work.”

Klein said she didn’t know about the video until Wednesday morning, and watched it for the first time at the police station when she went to help them with their investigation.

Klein told WHEC she plans to return to work but not on a bus carrying those students.

Msnbc.com's Jim Gold contributed to this article. Follow him on Facebook here.

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A young bear scampered between two schools in Bakersfield, Calif., disrupting a graduation ceremony, before being cornered in an apartment building and tasered by an animal control officer, NBC station KGET reports.

"Some girls came in running, uh there's a bear in front of the school. It ran through the elementary school playground before heading to the apartments across the street," Teresa Arambula, principal of Garza Elementary, told KGET on Thursday. Her school is beside Sierra Middle School.

The animal, thought to be one to two years old, weighed about 125 pounds, authorities said. In the video above, officers struggle with the animal, which has a snare loop around its neck, before capturing it and returning it to the wild.

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A 12-year-old boy risked his life to rescue his four younger siblings from a burning home near Pensacola, Fla.

Justin Jackson says he was watching over his three brothers and one sister when a fire broke out inside their home in Milton, Fla., on Sunday evening, NBC station WPMI-TV in Mobile, Ala., reported. His mom was working the night shift at a nursing home and his father had been away on business, according to local media reports.

“If he wasn’t here, we would not be alive,” Justin's 9-year-old brother, Emilio Jackson, told WPMI-TV. "I love him all the way to the universe and back."

A storm knocked out power to the neighborhood and the children had used a few candles to light up the house, according to WPMI-TV.

Justin said he was awakened by thunder and lightning, and then saw smoke. He leaped into action, grabbing his three brothers, including Diego, 6, and William, 5, WPMI-TV reported.

"I just picked them up and took them outside and I was knocking on neighbor's doors but none of them came out," Jackson told WPMI-TV.

Jackson said he ran back into the fire and kicked down the door to get his 3-year-old sister, Brooklynn.

"I was worried that I was not going to get my little sister out of there," Justin told WPMI-TV. "I had to pick her up and she was real stiff, I was just real scared at that point." 

After saving his sister, Justin said he dashed back into the burning home a third time to call 911.

"Smoke was in my eye. I couldn't see anything," WPMI-TV quoted Justin as saying.  

Jackson's mother, Tiffanie Jackson, said she was working when she received a telephone call concerning her children.

"When I saw the flames I was, like my house is on fire, I didn't know what to do. My life is burning up. My babies were in that,"  the children's mother, Tiffanie Jackson, told WPMI-TV. "There aren't enough words to describe how proud I am of Justin. He's my hero."

Said Justin: "I was just helping my family."

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Marine biologists say the spooky "Cascade Creature" seen drifting through the deep sea in a viral video isn't a whale placenta, a parachute, a plastic bag or an alien visitor: It's a type of jellyfish known as a Deepstaria enigmatica.

The video, which was apparently captured by a remotely operated vehicle near an underwater drilling site, caused a bit of a stir over the past couple of weeks among weird-science fans. Now it looks as if the truth is out there, thanks to assessments from experts such as Steven Haddock at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Craig McClain at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.

"This bag-like jelly is not that rare, but is large, so rarely seen intact," Haddock and his colleagues write on the JellyWatch Facebook page. "In the video, the swirling from the sub makes the medusa appear to undulate, and it even turns inside-out." They provide a helpful picture of a more typical specimen.

McClain is even more helpful in his posting at Deep Sea News. He provides citations on previous sightings of the beast, including explanations for the jellyfish's weirdly collapsed shape. And he shows through photographs and drawings that the strange appendage and whitish lumps seen in the video are D. enigmatica's gonads. TMI, Craig ... TMI.

For a third opinion, look no further than Australia's Nine News, which quotes Daniel Bucher, a marine biologist at Southern Cross University, as saying that the gonads were the giveaway.

Now that we've settled that, bring on the next sea monster.

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A gay woman who was tossed out as a Cub Scout leader is getting support from other parents.

Jennifer Tyrrell says she was the den leader for Pack 109's Tiger Scouts in Bridgeport, Ohio, for a year before her orientation became an issue.

The Boy Scouts of America has a strict policy when it comes to sexual orientation and membership. "We do not grant membership to individuals who are opened or avowed homosexuals," Bob Drury, the Scouts' executive for the Ohio River Valley, told NBC station WTOV.

But parent Rob Donn said Tyrrell's sexual orientation "was never an issue."

Get more on the story in the video above.

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