The crazed brawl involving 20 women outside a Staten Island NYCHA complex that ended with a woman stabbed to death defending her 12-year-old daughter started as a dispute on social media, police sources said Thursday.

What began as an online clash exploded into a bloody melee that ended with the stabbing death of Jennira Roundtree, a 43-year-old mother of four, outside her home in NYCHA’s West Brighton Houses Tuesday evening.

Detectives on Wednesday identified a 25-year-old woman with a criminal record as a suspect in the stabbing, The New York Daily News has learned. Police are still searching for her.

Relatives said Roundtree wasn’t even involved in the brawl and was only trying to pull her 13-year-old daughter out of the fray when someone in the crowd plunged a knife twice into the mom’s chest about 7:35 p.m., cops said. Roundtree was also slashed in the stomach with an umbrella.

“She only wanted to protect her baby,” a devastated relative told the Daily News. ”She only went outside to get her child in the house, only to find her child with a pack of more than a dozen girls on her. She tried to pull her child away and they all jumped her.”

Family and police sources said the content of the social media screeds was not immediately clear Thursday.

“I’m not sure how it started,” Diggs said. “But I do know it shouldn’t have ended in murder.”

In the days before her death, Roundtree, who worked as a security guard, according neighbors, appears to have been involved in her own social media scrum.

“Just punched a MF with both hands at the same time I’m not playing this year,” she posted on Facebook Jan. 3.

“B—h I’m an officer now so no I’m not fighting I’m gonna let you swing n pop your a– then you gonna go to jail for a minimum of 7 years,” she posted in her final Facebook message a day later, just three days before she was killed. “F–k wit me if you want to.”

A relative said the Facebook post is likely unrelated to the social media dispute involving Roundtree’s daughter.

“I think it may have started from her daughter’s page because this was a fight dealing with her daughter and one of her daughter’s friends,” the relative said.

Janice Diggs, the victim’s aunt, described Roundtree as an outgoing person.

“She loved her kids, loved them to death,” she said.

Relatives worried the victim’s daughters may still be in danger because there have been no arrests.

Neighbors and friends left cards and candles at a makeshift memorial outside the apartment building on Henderson Ave. near Broadway.

“This is a tradition in these projects that when someone passes away you give them respect by giving them a candle,” said one of Roundtree’s neighbors, a 70-year-old man. “I mean it’s only a dollar. It’s the thought that counts.”

A friend of the victim told ABC’s "Eyewitness News" that Roundtree used to host cookouts in the courtyard to bring the community together.

The friend said the open-to-all barbecues were a safe space that kept kids out of trouble.

A neighbor said Roundtree was friendly.

“We used to talk,” he said. “She had just got a new job. I saw her the other day. I said ‘How’s the new job?’ she said, ‘Oh, you know, it’s coming. It’s coming.'”

He said Roundtree’s death traumatized the whole community.

“She was a pretty woman too,” he said. “I’m kind of hurt. What’s going to happen to the kids?”

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