SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Is she really ‘mother of the year?’
Apr 29, 2015, 9:57 AM | Updated: 3:55 pm
Toya Graham yelled and struck her son when she found him throwing rocks at police in Baltimore, and it was all caught on camera.
Toya Graham has been dominating headlines ever since she was caught on video yelling, pulling and smacking her 16-year-old son before pulling him off the streets during a riot in Baltimore this week.
While Graham has been heralded as “mom of the year” by some, KIRO Radio’s Don O’Neill is hesitant to place that title.
“I don’t know,” Don said. “Everyone is celebrating her … I have a different take on it.”
Related: Dave Ross says parents should remain on standby in Baltimore
“Everybody on my Facebook page is calling her ‘mother of the year;’ mostly white people that live next to me in Queen Anne. It looks to me like she has probably hit him before, and if that’s the kind of mother you are to your son — I don’t know if that’s being a great mom. People are celebrating that. It bothers me that she is beating him like that.”
Don concedes that he is a white male living in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle — an environment that is worlds apart from Baltimore.
“But I must say that I’ve spent time living in Echo Park in south-central Los Angeles,” he said. “It seems like you would hope that she would have the kind of relationship with her son where she could walk over and go, ‘Hey, we’re going home.'”
Ron challenged that perspective, saying that the activity behind the incident places a special context on the mom’s actions.
“He was fully engaged in rioting, he’s in riot mode, he’s throwing rocks, he’s covering his face up,” Ron said. “If I saw a kid beating up another kid or throwing a rock at somebody and the parent went over there did that, yeah, I would say, ‘Good job.'”
But Don remained uncertain that beating as a reaction to violence is the best response.
“So now we have kids who think it’s OK to throw rocks and things at cops and then we have parents who think it’s OK to correct the kid by hitting the kid,” Don said. “I don’t think she’s the mom of the year. I just don’t.”
Graham told TV news reporters the next day, “He’s my only son, and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray.”
The police will present their first report on the Freddie Gray incident to prosecutors on Friday. Dave Ross says parents should remain on standby in Baltimore.
