Catherine Guziejka at her sentencing hearing (KLTV).
A Texas daycare employee, aged 45, is facing a decade-long prison term after being convicted of physically abusing multiple toddlers over 100 times within a few months, described as actions taken “without any justification.”
Catherine Guziejka received a 10-year prison sentence on Wednesday for her offenses against several children between July and October 2024 at Punkin’ Doodles Day Care in Lindale, located approximately 200 miles north of Houston. According to court documents, Guziejka admitted guilt in September to charges of injuring a child with the intent to inflict bodily harm.
Smith County Assistant District Attorney Richard Vance, speaking to KLTV, a local ABC affiliate, explained that Guziejka was handed the maximum sentence permissible for a third-degree felony. While the families of the victims accepted the sentence, they expressed “frustration” that it couldn’t be more severe.
This wasn’t a case of disciplining misbehaving children or a moment of being overwhelmed.
“The children were simply sitting quietly when this occurred,” Vance conveyed to the news station. “This wasn’t a situation where there was chaos and she lost control. It was an ongoing, unprovoked behavior.”
Although the children did not suffer significant physical harm, Vance expressed concern about the potential long-term psychological impact on them.
“It could be years from now and something [could] trigger them,” he said.
Guziejka’s attorneys reportedly blamed her actions on her low IQ, saying it was lower than 80% of the population.
The investigation kicked off in October 2024 when an employee at the day care performed a review of the facility’s security camera footage, a probable cause affidavit obtained by Tyler CBS affiliate KSLA stated. During the review, the employee allegedly saw Guziejka kicking a 2-year-old boy in the lower back while the child was on the floor.
The employee notified the victim’s father about the incident on Oct. 23, 2024, and the father immediately contacted the Smith County Sheriff’s Office and filed a report.
Investigators then reviewed footage from the day care and said they uncovered evidence of Guziejka physically assaulting six different 2-year-olds 134 different times.
Many of the attacks on the toddlers involved a similar situation in which the victim was watching something on television when Guziejka would approach them from behind and kick them in the lower back using her right foot, local CBS and CW affiliate KYTX reported.
Other examples of abusive behavior that investigators reported seeing multiple times on the footage included Guziejka standing on the toddlers’ hands, aggressively moving them around in their sleep, and grabbing a sleeping child by the arm and dragging them to changing tables.
When changing the children, Guziejka would also regularly force the children to stare at the wall instead of the television on the opposite side of the room by aggressively holding the victims’ heads down.
Melanie Dawn Law, the former owner of Punkin’ Doodles Day Care, reportedly reviewed the security footage before speaking to police. During her law enforcement interview, Law reportedly confirmed that Guziejka had been assaulting the children since July with at least 100 different instances of abuse being uncovered. She said Guziejka — who was initially hired in September 2023 — was fired immediately after the abuse was revealed and all of the footage depicting the abuse was then turned over to investigators.
Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith told KLTV it was fortunate that none of the children were seriously injured by Guziejka, saying it has been limited to “minor to medium bruising.”
