Baltimore mother Toya Graham was shown in a viral video smacking her son after spotting him masked and ready to join the rioting.

Baltimore MomToya Graham On Parenting Son

Graham explained that she stepped in to confront her son because she wanted to protect him from the same fate of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died from injuries sustained in an arrest by Baltimore police and in whose name people were protesting.

“He gave me eye contact. And at that point, you know, not even thinking about cameras or anything like that. That’s my only son and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” Graham told CBS News.

“At that point, I just lost it,” Graham added. “I was shocked, I was angry, because you never want to see your child out there doing that.”

Graham is a single mother to six children, with 16-year-old Michael Graham her only son. She takes protecting her son from the streets very seriously, even attempting to keep him inside the house when possible.

“There’s some days that I’ll shield him in the house just so he won’t go outside and I know that I can’t do that for the rest of my life,” said Graham. “I’m a no-tolerant mother. Everybody that knows me, know I don’t play that.”

Michael, who visibly winced in the video when he took note of his mother’s presence, knew that she would not be happy to see him masked and potentially readying himself to throw rocks or loot local businesses.

“He knew he was in trouble,” said Graham. “He said when ‘I seen you,’ he said, ‘ma, my instinct was to run.'”

While Graham agrees with the general consensus that has emerged from her viral smacking of her son that more mothers should be taking charge of their kids like she is, she is also aware that mothers can’t be everywhere at the same time. Many mothers have to work to support their kids and a parent can only say so much to their children before they have to trust them to make the right decisions on their own.

“We don’t know where those mothers are at, a lot of mothers have to provide for their children,” said Graham. “You can talk blue in your face to your children, but at the end of the day they gonna make their own decisions. As parents we just have to follow through to make sure that’s where they supposed to be at.”