Baltimore mom, son speak out about fight on video

Both mother AND son — whose filmed confrontation on the edge of the Baltimore riots went viral — are speaking out about what happened and why the teenager, wearing a mask and carrying a brick, was there in the first place.

The original footage, shot by WMAR-TV's ABC2 News, shows Toya Graham slapping her 16-year-old son, Michael Singlton, and forcing him to leave the area of the protests, which later turned violent.

The footage has been viewed more than 7 million times on YouTube.

Graham, ignoring TV cameras, charged up to Michael when she saw him with a brick.

Singlton tells WMAR that he had gone to the protests because "I needed to go down there and support my friends," but concedes he wasn't thinking about his mother at the time.

"A couple of years ago, my homeboy got beat by police. So I wanted to go there and protest with him," Singlton told WMAR-TV. "For real, for real, my mom wasn't on my mind. Police was just on my mind."

Graham, a single mother with six kids who said she recently lost her job, told ABC2 News that disciplining her son is nothing new for her.

"When the cameras are not there and it's just me and my son and I'm trying to show him right from wrong, and then you get to a situation like that and you see him doing wrong you just react, because you teach him better than that," she said.

Mother and son were also speaking out in an interview on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" Wednesday night, with Graham saying she was not concerned that she was embarrassing her son.

"Not at all," she said. "He was embarrassing himself by wearing that mask and that hoodie and doing what he was doing."

Graham told Cooper that she lost it when she spotted Michael with a brick in his hand.

"I did (get emotional). You know, once he threw that rock down I said, 'You weren't brought up like this,' " she said. She told CNN that Michael was not a perfect child, but is also not a thug.

Singlton told CNN that he understands that his mother was there looking out for him.

"She didn't want me to get in trouble (with the) law. She didn't want me to be like another Freddie Gray," he said, referring to the 25-year-old man whose death from a spinal injury while in police custody sparked the protests.

He said he thought he had seen her in the area, but knew for sure when he heard her voice: "It was just World War III from right there."

For her part, Graham told CNN she noticed that a TV crew was filming the scene, but didn't think anything of it at the time — and didn't care.

"I wasn't there to be recorded. I was there to get my child," she said.