Megan Finnerty

The Republic | azcentral.com

Shanesha Taylor faces two felony charges for leaving two children in her SUV for 45 minutes while at a job interview in Scottsdale.

Since her arrest March 21%2C a fund-raising site set up by a stranger has raised more than %2486%2C000.

"She's doing on a day what most people do in a whole campaign%2C" said consultant Richard Swart.

Experts say they've never heard of the public so moved by the details of an arrested person's life.

Something about her mug shot and the story of her arrest have turned Phoenix's Shanesha Taylor into one of America's most successful charity crowd-funding recipients.

Taylor was arrested March 21 on child-abuse charges after leaving her 6-month-old and 2-year-old alone in her Dodge Durango for 45 minutes while at a job interview in Scottsdale. She told police she was jobless, without child care that day, and that she had occasionally been homeless.

Since her arrest, a charity fund-raising website set up on her behalf has raised more than $88,000.

That's more than $6,200 per day.

Experts say this puts Taylor just behind the most notable group of crowd-funded charity recipients: a handful of Boston Marathon bombing victims who raised more than $100,000 each after they received extensive media coverage.

Taylor, 35, was released from jail March 31 on $9,000 bond, and indicted on two felony counts. Her children were examined at a hospital the day of her arrest and released as uninjured. They are now with family, according to updates on her fund-raising page on youcaring.com.

If convicted, Taylor faces a minimum of two years of probation for each count.

Taylor, who is scheduled to enter a plea Monday, has not said where she is staying or clarified what her housing situation was prior to her arrest.

"She's doing (in) a day what most people do in a whole campaign," said Richard Swart, a crowd-funding consultant and director of the Program for Innovation in Entrepreneurial and Social Finance at the University of California-Berkeley, where he's working on a report on the scope of crowd funding.

"This is an exceptionally rare event. This demonstrates that it's really resonating with people emotionally."

More than 3,000 people have donated, many leaving messages:

• "Having been poor and homeless at a time in my life, I understand the feeling of not having support."

• "My giving isn't condoning the act, but it's to say we all fall on hard times."

• "I can't imagine the desperation you must have felt leaving your kids in the car, but I understand that desperate times call for desperate actions."

Sadhbh Walshewrites about the intersection of poverty and justice and said she'd never heard of the public so moved by the details of an arrested person's life.

"I think that she was homeless mattered some to people," Walshe said. "But the fact that she was looking for a job was of huge interest, because people know what it's like; they are struggling, too."

Walshe mentioned Taylor in a column on April 2 for Britain's Guardian newspaper.

"She's really, really lucky that she's had these circumstances that people latched on to and then shared socially; they're really coming together in a certain way to get the public to be on her side."

The story of Taylor's arrest in front of a Farmer's Insurance office starts at a point in her past she's not ready to talk about.

But the story of the public's response starts with her booking photo, one of between 25 and 45 taken daily at Scottsdale Police Department District 2.

The image shows a flush-faced Taylor crying so hard that her tears have collected under her jaw, the white of the flash reflecting in harsh streaks under each eye and down her throat.

"It's an extremely powerful photograph, one of the most striking booking mugs I've ever seen," said photographer Brian Smith, who won the Pulitzer Prize for covering the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

"Great portraits are all about emotion," said Smith, now a celebrity portrait photographer in Miami. "Even if you only focus on the eyes, they have so much emotion there; that's what people respond to. I don't think you can look at that photo and not feel empathy for the person in front of that camera."

When Amanda Bishop, 24, read about Taylor's arrest, she wanted to learn more about Taylor because of the photo.

"The devastation on her face — you could tell, she's hurt, she's upset, she just lost her children, she's scared," said Bishop, who is from Arizona but now lives in north New Jersey.

Bishop went to Taylor's Facebook page, where she saw years of photos: a mother taking her children to see Santa, celebrating her daughter's birthday at school, and kids playing on the carpet in the family room.

Then Bishop thought about Taylor's story. She'd told police she was homeless, sometimes sleeping in her mom's garage, sometimes sleeping in her car in a Walmart parking lot. She was unable to find childcare but felt like she couldn't miss the job interview.

"I was raised by parents who struggled to give us what we needed, too," Bishop said. "I really felt for her children. They need their mom. She was doing her best. And not all homelessness is living in a park or sleeping in a car."

On the night of Taylor's arrest, it was Bishop who launched a 31-day campaign to raise $9,000 for anything she might need.

Crowd funding has its roots in direct-appeal fundraising campaigns for specific artistic projects, but the concept took off between 2008 and 2010, when sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and GoFundMe leveraged the growing popularity of social media on behalf of projects as diverse as developing a smart phone, paying for dog surgery and covering burial expenses.

Experts say the amount of fundraising tied to legal problems and arrests is negligible. Most projects on the more than 500 crowd-funding sites focus on the arts, education and medical care, generally raising amounts in the low thousands of dollars.

On youcaring.com, the average goal is $2,265 and the average raised is just above that at $3,036, a spokesman said.

All successful campaigns have a compelling story, a sense of trustworthiness and amplification through social or traditional media, said Sherwood Neiss, a principal at Crowdfund Capital Advisers in Miami.

Taylor's fund-raising page has been shared more than 16,000 times on Facebook, and her story has been featured widely, including on network affiliate stations, the Huffington Post and MSNBC's "News Nation with Tamron Hall."

Typically, people give to groups they have an affinity with: shared interests, ethnicity or race, geographic proximity or nationality, Neiss said.

"It comes from people wanting to be a part of being something bigger than themselves, and the high that comes from giving to someone in need," Neiss said.

Fewer than .01 percent of campaigns are fraudulent, said Swart, the Berkeley crowd-funding expert. Taylor's page says the funds are going into her mother's bank account and will be used to hire an attorney and secure safe housing.

Earlier this week, Taylor updated her youcaring.com page with a message to her donors: "Thank you to all who love and support me. I am home and safe... I appreciate everyone who felt move(d) enough to help a complete stranger."