It was the kind of galling story that prompts the Internet into action: a toddler boy really, really wanted to wear a hot pink ruffled headband out shopping with his mom. So he did. Then a burly fellow shopper snatched the accessory off his head and called him an anti-gay slur. “You’ll thank me later, little man,” the dude allegedly said.

The child’s mother didn’t tell store management or the police, and instead blogged about it. The post got attention, went viral, and was republished on the Huffington Post. You’ll notice that we’re not linking to it, though, because the post has been pulled from the Post and her personal blog taken down as well. That’s because some of the attention that comes from everyone sharing such a sensational story on Facebook is inevitably negative, and the mother didn’t cope well.

News outlets in central Florida report that on Monday, she was taken into custody at a psychiatric institution after expressing suicidal thoughts online. She was released late yesterday. She claimed that the negative attention and threats to her family after the post became popular caused a mental breakdown.

Local police continue to investigate the incident, looking at surveillance footage from the store during the period of the alleged assault and insult to see whether this incident even happened in the first place. For her part, the mom insists that she didn’t make the incident up, but she doesn’t care whether the incident was actually captured on camera. “I don’t think it will do any good. I just want it to go away,” she told a local newspaper.

You can read the text of the original post over at the Advocate. Here’s Google’s cache of the page before it went down.

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