Mom slaps son, rips him from Baltimore riots

Mary Bowerman | USA TODAY Network

Show Caption Hide Caption Watch mom snatch masked son from Baltimore protest This mom is being called "mother of the year" after cameras captured her snatching her son from a Freddie Gray protest in Baltimore and scolding him for his behavior. Gray died in police custody from a severe spinal cord injury.

WARNING: Video included in tweet contains profane language.

An angry woman is being applauded after she was caught on camera slapping her son and ripping him out of Baltimore riots on Monday.

"That's my only son and at the end of the day I don't want him to be a Freddie Gray," Toya Graham told CBS News, referencing the 25-year-old man who had died while in police custody earlier in April.

WMAR-TV captured footage of the woman screaming at the young man, 16, dressed from head to toe in black, to "take the mask off" and telling him to "get over here" as she slaps him.

Graham told CBS News, "At that point, I just lost it. I was shocked, I was angry, because you never want to see your child out there doing that."

Graham is a single mom with six kids, according to CBS. She says, "I'm a no-tolerant mother. Everybody that knows me, know I don't play that."

By late Monday night, the video had become so popular that Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts referenced the incident during a press conference, CBS Baltimore reported. He said that many of the rioters were young people from nearby high schools and he encouraged parents to tell their children to go home.

"And if you saw in one scene, you had one a mother who grabbed their child who had a hood on his head and she started smacking him on the head because she was so embarrassed. I wish I had more parents who took charge of their kids tonight," Batts told reporters. "I think these were youth coming out of the high school and they thought it was cute to throw cinder blocks at the police department, and address it that way."

Charles Payne, Fox Business Network contributor, tweeted that the Baltimore woman is "mother of the year."

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