A worker at a £1,900-a-month Montessori nursery has today been found guilty of assaulting 21 toddlers.
Roksana Lecka, 22, has been convicted of ‘badly harming’ 21 infants at the Riverside Nursery in Twickenham, south-west London, last year, and a further charge from a previous workplace.
She admitted seven counts of child cruelty, including kicking a boy in the face and punching a girl in the side, justifying this behaviour by claiming she was sleep deprived from smoking cannabis all night with her boyfriend.
Lecka denied 17 other similar charges but a jury today found her unanimously guilty.
One child was repeatedly kicked in the face by Lecka who even punched a baby after dragging her out of a cot.
Horrified parents first began photographing and reporting unexplained injuries on their children’s tiny bodies as early as March last year.
Staff also noticed the children had been scratched and bruised and Lecka was suspended on June 28, 2024.
The 22-year-old told her trial she was ‘addicted’ to vaping and would be ‘moody’ if she wasn’t able to puff on the device during work
Roksana Lecka has been convicted of ‘badly harming’ 23 of the infants, all aged 18 months to two years, at a £1,900-a-month Montessori nursery in Twickenham, south-west London
Detectives watched hours of CCTV and Lecka was charged with 24 counts of child cruelty.
Parents had been compiling evidence of the abuse of their children for months leading up to her being charged, Kingston Crown Court heard.
They watched in horror in court as jurors were shown some of Lecka’s sadistic attacks.
Lecka admitted seven of the charges against her but denied a further 17.
Today after nine hours and 53 minutes, jurors convicted her of 14 of the remaining 17 child cruelty counts and acquitted her of three.
Parents in the public gallery wept as the verdicts were read out.
The 22-year-old denied 17 counts of child cruelty, but admitted seven similar offences, while working at the Riverside Nursery (pictured) between January 31 and June 28 last year
There were gasps from jurors and weeping parents in the public gallery as horrifying footage of Lecka’s attacks on toddlers, who were left writhing in agony, was shown during her trial.
But the 22-year-old, who moved to Britain from Katowice in southern Poland when she was three, explained away each sickening act of violence with a chilling nonchalance.
Giving evidence in a smart black suit jacket over a black top, her blonde hair tied back in a neat ponytail, she claimed that an alleged pinch to a boy’s stomach was simply a tender hug.
A rough yank on a boy’s hair was a ‘ruffle with my fingers.’
A series of violent jabs to another toddler’s stomach that left his abdomen black and blue were just ‘playful pokes to the side,’ she insisted.
A baby Lecka smacked twice around the face while puffing on her vape was actually only crying because ‘she was distressed having just woken up from a nap.’
And a sickening moment when she threw a girl onto a mat had merely been some ‘rough handling,’ she declared.
The former beauty worker changed several pleas to guilty just before her trial begun, having been shown enhanced CCTV that irrefutably illustrated her crimes.
She desperately sought to rationalise her behaviour with a series of pathetic excuses, including that she would get ‘moody’ if she could not smoke her vape at work, did not have enough sleep, was still feeling the effects of cannabis smoked the night before and had been suffering from period cramps.
Her own evidence was damning of the chaotic environment at Riverside Nursery, part of a prestigious group of educational institutions run by Dukes Education.
Lecka, who is from Poland but moved to the UK with her parents when she was younger, was caught on CCTV kicking a boy in the face and punching a girl in the side
Lecka tried to justify her behaviour by claiming she was sleep deprived from smoking cannabis all night with her boyfriend
Lecka admitted she hadn’t bothered to complete her online safeguarding modules, and staff turnover was so high that workers were constantly training others while on the job.
She said she would frequently take toilet breaks to smoke a vape she kept in her bra, which she was seen on CCTV smoking next to children, and would take cannabis with her boyfriend – sometimes before work.
Despite this she was praised by management as a model employee and recalled: ‘They had experience with people my age or younger who wouldn’t stick to the job or do it properly but [head teacher] Noor one day called me into her office and said I was doing really well, she’s really proud of me.
‘She had even bought me pink roses.
‘She said if I continued to do so well she would sort it for me to do Level 3 childcare courses if it was something I wanted.’
That she was held in such high esteem goes some way to explain why staff were for so long unable to link her to the horrific injuries suffered by children in their care – injuries that for months were explained away to parents as innocuous accidents.
As consultant paediatrician Dr Stephen Rose told the trial, they should have recognised that wounds including bruised earlobes, torsos and thighs must have been caused deliberately.
‘Ears do not get injured or bruised accidentally…if it is a bruise it was caused non-accidentally or deliberately inflicted,’ he said.
‘The side of the torso is relatively protected by the arm, so it is not an area that is bruised accidentally.’
Dr Rose added that marks on a child’s thigh had likely been caused on purpose because toddlers who fall backwards land on their bottoms, not their thighs.
Lecka, who has two younger siblings, was supported throughout the trial by her mother.
The Polish national, who studied beauty at Kingston College and worked as a babysitter, barmaid and at a laser removal clinic before getting her job at the nursery, will be sentenced at a later date.
