Two children were taken from the couple behind the YouTube “prank” channel DaddyOFive after their biological mother won temporary custody.
Hall's attorney, Tim Conlon, said in a video Monday, that the Frederick County Circuit Court had granted her an emergency order for temporary custody of Cody and Emma Martin "so that they'd be safe."
Conlon said the sheriff's office assisted Hall in "retrieving" her children on Friday.
"It was very heartbreaking and disturbing to see my kids being abused," Hall said in the video, adding the children were doing good and "getting back to their playful selves."
Hall said Cody "had a difficult time" when officers were taking him away from the Martins.
"He said some things that were disturbing...that he hated me, that Mike and Heather told him that I threw him away like he was garbage and I didn't love him no more," Hall said, adding that he calmed down after she showed him a childhood memento.
Clarke told BuzzFeed News that the sheriff's office "had no issues with service."
Cody, the youngest child in the group, was a frequent target in his parent's pranks and appeared to be the most resistant to them, according to popular YouTube commentator Philip DeFranco, who argued that DaddyOFive's most recent video amounted to possible child abuse.
In that video, Heather hurled obscenities at Cody after falsely accusing him of pouring ink on his bedroom carpet. In the video, Cody was seen crying hysterically and denying the accusations while his parents called him a liar. The videos have now been deleted from their YouTube account.
In another "prank" clip, Cody is seen being shoved into a bookcase.
Mike and Heather Martin expressed remorse for their actions in a video last month. "This has been the absolute worst week of our life and we realized we have made some terrible parenting decisions and we just want to make things right," a tearful Heather said in the video.
"We went from something that wasn't so bad and then we kept going more and more for the shock factor versus reality to see what could get more views," Heather said.
"And the kids kind of feel like some of it is their fault, and it's not their fault. We're the parents and we should have made better decisions," she said.
Heather said that they were now in family counseling "not only to get through the media stuff but we need to come back together and have everybody, even the kids, to understand what we did wrong in all of this."
Responding to the custody issue, Laurie Wasserman, an attorney for the Martins, told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday that "it would be highly inappropriate for me to discuss the details of this very sensitive matter, or any associated proceedings, publicly."
The Martins are working with Fallston Group, a public relations and crisis management firm, which published a blog post on April 28, saying that the family "truly seemed to love each other but was in crisis and desperately needed stability and a return to normalcy for the kids."
The firm said it did not condone "some of the content" posted to the YouTube channel, but said that the Martins "now fully understand that they crossed the line and they describe how what started out as family fun quickly escalated into shock value for the purpose of viewership and subscriptions."
"They were caught up in their own characters and popularity – they were blinded by YouTube fame and again, upon reflection, made some very poor decisions," the blog post said.
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/2pYmAP2
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