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Parents Stand By Baltimore Mother

MOUNT POCONO — It was the video seen around the United States: Toya Graham grabbing her 16-year-old son after she saw him in a crowd of people as part of ...

MOUNT POCONO -- It was the video seen around the United States: Toya Graham grabbing her 16-year-old son after she saw him in a crowd of people as part of the riots in Baltimore.

"That's a good mom," said Douglas Amey of Blooming Grove.

"That's being a parent: you love for your children and you don't want them to get hurt, and to do the right thing," said Hector Cotto of Tobyhanna.

"That's my only son and I don't want him to be a Freddie Gray," Toya Graham told CBS News.

The sight of Graham's son is familiar to Chezar Baptiste.

"She did the right thing. She recognized him," said Baptiste. "And she did the right thing because he could have been locked up in jail something."

Baptiste went through a similar experience with his grandmother in Trinidad during the 1970 revolution.

"She had a pocketbook in her hand and threw it at me and I said, 'Go back home,'" Baptiste added. "When I went back home, she said, 'Don't worry. Change will come.'"

People in Mount Pocono say while the riots are different, the way parents are reacting is the same as it was 50 years ago.

"I lived through it in Brooklyn in the civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, when people were rioting," said Hector Cotto of Tobyhanna. "I've seen it firsthand when people in the neighborhood looted."

"It's like the '50s," said Amey. "That would happen to me. Mothers take care of their kids. That should happen more often."

As for what they would do if it were their children, parents say not much would've been different.

"I would've said to them, 'We have a legal system in the country. We want to let them handle it and we certainly don't want anyone else getting hurt," said Mary Johnson of Tobyhanna. "I wouldn't want you to be one of those who get hurt."

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