When is it ever a good time to hit another person with a baseball bat? A Tacoma, Washington mother learned that you can't even do that to someone you know is a sex offender, without spending time behind bars.
Tammy Gibson of Tacoma, Washington will be spending the next three months behind bars after she was convicted of taking a baseball bat and beating a sex offender last summer, who was talking with her daughter.
Gibson says she has no remorse for the June 19 incident, but she did plead no contest Friday to assault. She could have gotten as much as eight months in jail, but the judge sentenced her to just three. She told ABC News Seattle affiliate KOMO-TV,
"No, I'd do it again if not better. I don't care if it hurts me, I don't regret it. It got him away from my kids and all the other kids in the neighborhood."
What's called a Level-3 sex offender, William A. Baldwin had moved into his uncle's home in Tacoma last June. That's when county deputies distributed flyers around the neighborhood alerting residents to his presence.
On June 19, just a few weeks after this, Gibson went to the house in the trailer park and asked for Baldwin.
When Baldwin stepped outside, she told him she was going to kill him because he had molested her children. Gibson then slammed Baldwin repeatedly with her bat, injuring his arm.
But it turns out that Gibson's children had never been molested by Baldwin, but that she had recognized him as the man on the flyer who had chatted up her then 10-year old daughter the previous summer. There's no mistaking Baldwin, who stands 7 feet, 3 inches tall. Gibson says she did it without thinking.
"For him to be right there, in front of my house and talking to my child -- made me crazy. And I told him I thought he was a piece of crap and I smacked him. I just didn't stop hitting him. I just told him that 'if it were up to me, I'd kill ya."
The daughter she was protecting sat through her mother's sentencing on Friday in tears. The girl, Maria Perez, said of Baldwin,
"He tried to give me fireworks and I wouldn't take it."
Gibson said she hoped that the attention created by her case would lead to a change in the laws regarding released sex offenders.
"I would hope that me doing this and going to jail would change something, change some kind of law, change something where people like him can't be standing around little kids you know what I mean? It's not right, it's not fair to the kids at all."
Whether you think her behavior was right or wrong, her tactics did work to keep Baldwin away from her children. Court records show he has since moved out from Tacoma to Seattle.
