Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Judge Locks Up 'Sadistic' Nursery Worker for Abusing Babies

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Roksana Lecka, 22, is going to prison in the United Kingdom after security cameras recorded her abusing babies. Metropolitan Police detectives say Lecka scratched and pinched babies and even kicked one child in the face. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy goes through some of Lecka's arrest and interrogation footage in this episode of Crime Fix —a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:Download the FREE Upside App at https://upside.app.link/crimefix to get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.Host:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest:Dr. Daniel Bober https://www.instagram.com/drdanielbober/Producer:Jordan ChaconCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. No, there's no empathy at all, is there? No remorse. A daycare worker who's been described as sadistic is exposed and found guilty of abusing 21 babies. I go over the shocking acts of cruelty by Roxanna Leka and how the judge punished her. These are children. You are effectively abusing children, physically abusing children, and you have got nothing but no comment to say. And I've just never seen anything like it.

Welcome to Crime Fix. I'm Annionette Levy. This case is absolutely unbelievable. And there's video to go along with it. When you drop off your kids at daycare, I'm sure you hope. trust that they're being cared for by kind and loving people who will love them and treat them like you do, especially when they're babies and they can't do anything for themselves. Well, over in the UK, in London specifically, there was a daycare, they call them nurseries there, where a woman was abusing babies. 22-year-old Roxanna Lecca, she thought no one was watching, but the cameras were. And thank goodness that there were cameras before a baby was critically injured or possibly even killed. The former nursery workers' crimes came to light after a colleague reported her

behavior as unusual on June 28, 24, noticing that she appeared flustered. The nursery sent Leca home for pinching a number of babies. That incident resulted in her suspension. This horrifying breach of trust prompted an investigation by Metropolitan Police into Leca's role as an early a year's educator at Riverside Nursery. The investigation uncovered horrible abuse of babies at two nurseries between October 2023 and June of 2024. The abuse happened while Lekka worked at Little Munchkins in Hounslow. It's unclear why she stopped working there, but in January of 2024, she was hired by the Twickenham nursery in southwest London. According to police, there were no concerns at the time Lekka applied for the job. But during her time at the time,

the nursery, parents started reporting unusual injuries and bruising as early as March. Detectives reviewed more than 300 hours of security footage from the nursery, and they found several instances of Roxanna Leca, needlessly and senselessly abusing babies, even kicking one in the face. Yes, kicking a baby in the face. The footage showed Leca, pinching and scratching children under their clothes, on their arms, legs, and stomach, and the cameras even recorded their innocent reactions to the abuse, these helpless children, flinching or crying. Other instances of abuse include this. You can see Roxanna Leca's vape light go off and on while she hits it. She's blowing smoke right there by the cribs, subjecting the infants to who knows what? Was it nicotine?

Cannabis? Who knows? Police also obtained footage of Leca kicking a child who was on the floor, pushing children headfirst over cots, shoving another child onto a mattress in their sleep, and aggressively covering a toddler's mouth as he started to cry. It doesn't matter what age the children would be. This is all illegal and abusive, but these are babies. They can't even talk. The youngest child was 10 months old at the time. Now, you'd think that Roxanna might feel a little bad about this.

But when metropolitan police detectives go to arrest her, she seems unfazed. Take a look. Roxanna, an navigation's been made, okay, that you've been seen on a number of occasions to insult children or cyber. Yeah, I've heard about that. Yeah. But, Roxanna, you are going to be under arrest today, okay? We need to take you to the police station yet so that you can be interviewed about it.

Despite being in custody, Luka still doesn't appear to be bothered by the situation or recognize just how serious it is. On the mattress, he seems to be crying. Sorry, am I boring you? No, sorry. No, no, no, no, no, I'm listening. I have to take a moment to tell you about this app I've been using. I absolutely love it.

It's called Upside, and it's really great because it will give you cash back on things that you buy every day, like gas, groceries and takeout. This will give you real money that goes right into your bank account. It's awesome. So right now, when I pump gas, I use Upside. I even use it when I go to Dunkin' Donuts for a drink. And I especially use it when I go out and buy ice cream, which I do all too often. Why not try it and get cash back on all of these things? This is how it works.

Once you have the app, claim an offer on Upside for whatever you're buying, pay as usual using a debit or credit card, and then follow the steps and get paid. It's that easy. So to find out how much you could earn, click the link in the description to download upside or scan that QR code that you see right there on your screen and use our promo code crime fix to get an extra 25 cents back on every gallon on your first tank of gas. that's promo code crime fix for an extra 25 cents back on your first gallon of gas. Now, it's clear that Roxanna Aleka is not taking accountability for her actions.

So detectives suppress her a little more. They're trying to figure out why she did this and whether she will admit to it. Picture her mom took when she came home from nursery. None of these injuries were there the day before. So she'd got those at nursery. What about these big, big red marks and bruises to her back? Any idea about those? No comment.

Did you cause those? No comment. I go through and watch the footage, am I going to see you touching her back and grabbing her back? No comment. Anything you'd like to say? No comment. Roxanna, how does that make you feel seeing injury photos on a baby?

Because for me, I find that really difficult to look at, seeing clear marks on a little baby. How does that make you feel? No comment. Do you feel any sort of sadness about that? No comment. Would you just not care? No comment.

You've not told us that you've kicked. one of the kids in the face, haven't you? So what if there was a serious injury to that baby that could have caused it more harm down the line? Four weeks later, we're here again. I mean, you've got any empathy for any children or any of the ones you've assaulted? No comment.

Not told us about kicking that kid in the face when we showed you the CCTV last time, did you? No comment. No empathy at all, is there? No remorse. No comment. It's just completely outrageous that we have to go back to parents and say,

say we've spoken to you and you've sat here going no comment you've shown no emotion no remorse nothing to go back to them and say look we've seen what she's done she's shown remorse she's apologetic she said whatever you just saying on no comments i'm going to go back to each parent and tell them we spoke to you just sat here emotionless nothing nothing at all for these babies these are children you're effectively abusing children physically abusing children physically abusing children and you have got nothing but no comments saying. I've just never seen anything like it. So Roxanne Lecca, she's not answering any of the questions.

She won't admit to any wrongdoing, but her actions, they're irrefutable. She's on video doing all of this. She was released on bail and suspended from work as the child abuse team continued to investigate. About two weeks later, Metro Police arrest her again. But this time, detectives have enough evidence to arrest her on 12 counts of child cruelty, 12 counts of actual bodily harm and attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent. Later, Leka's charges were amended to 24 counts of child cruelty against 24 children. She maintained her innocence until just a few days before the trial began.

After being shown enhanced CCTV footage of her crimes, she changed her plea on seven counts to guilty. When Leka was asked in court why she lied, she blamed it on cannabis. That's what marijuana comes from. And she told the jury that she would get moody if she could not smoke her vape at work. Yes, seriously. And she even tried to blame her boyfriend saying that she had been over-prioritizing him and she was addicted to him, addicted to her boyfriend and cannabis.

Ultimately, Roxanna was convicted of 21 of the 24 counts that she faced. Parents of multiple children spoke at her sentencing to explain the impact. of the abuse, some calling her a threat to society while others expressed guilt about placing their children in her care to begin with. Leka wrote a letter to the court saying she had reflected on her actions and offered an apology to the parents admitting that cannabis turned her into a different person. So to discuss this really, really disturbing case, I want to turn now to Dr. Daniel Bober. He is a forensic psychiatrist and he deals with a lot of people who have very disturbed minds and do a lot of disturbing things.

So Dr. Bober, Roxanna Leka is somebody who was caught on camera abusing these children, in some instances, pinching them, these little, you know, babies, kicking them in some instances, really doing seriously harsh, cruel things to these children. And yet when she's confronted, you know, she acts, she's very nonservous. Chalant, she's in the interrogation room and just is like, no comment, no comment. What is going on with this girl? This young woman, I should say. You know, as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I deal with a lot of first-time parents. And certainly being a first-time mom can be overwhelming, especially if your temperament is such that you have a low frustration tolerance. And so simple things like a child crying incessantly can cause people to have an extreme emotional

reaction and sometimes they go too far. But this is something entirely different. The system really failed here. We have victims who are essentially pre-verbal. We have probably no visible signs of injury. We have a staff that likely wasn't checking the CCTV footage. So a lot of things fell through the cracks here, which created the environment for this to occur. It makes you wonder how many times she did it before she actually got caught. Usually when people get caught doing something, it's not the first time. And so these children, I mean, there could have been very grave consequences to her actions, especially when she's kicking children.

And I don't understand, you know, if you can't handle a job working in a nursery, then you shouldn't be there. But she is continuing to work there. So was she getting maybe potentially some kind of. pleasure, sick pleasure out of this, like enjoying, inflicting pain on these children. I know you have an examiner, but it kind of makes me wonder. Well, yes, I was just going to say I agree with you, right? This is not someone who, by all accounts, couldn't make ends meet.

She needed the job. She didn't have a choice. This is someone who I think, again, not examining her, took sadistic pleasure, got gratification from the act and felt that she was control. And very often people like this are out of control in their own lives. And this is the only place that they feel that they can dominate. And so I do think she received some gratification from it. Again, not being someone who knows about her mental health history or who's spoken to her or examined her in any way from outward appearances, it would seem that way. Yeah, it's really, really disturbing and she's just so nonchalant I mean I don't think she was going to say yeah you got me

but this is somebody who's obviously not willing to take some accountability for what she's done because she just doesn't seem to have a care in the world when she's discussing this when she's being confronted with these very serious allegations when I see someone like this I think about someone who has callous and unemotional traits, who lacks empathy, who has a low frustration tolerance, who's impulsive, but who went through great, but who went to great lengths to conceal their crime, you know, was seen on CCTV, looking around, making sure that no one was watching, made sure that no one was there to stop her from doing what she was doing. So there was certainly a premeditation to it and intentionality that was there. This wasn't something where, you know,

most of the kids were crying and she got overwhelmed and she acted out. This was cold. This was calculated and it was methodical. Where does that come from? I mean, where does that, where does that develop? I mean, maybe it, maybe she was mistreated as a youngster or maybe not. You know, I don't know where this is coming from. So sort of the, the pop culture, spin on this is always, well, they must have been abused too. That's why they do this. But often it comes down to many factors. Often it is genetic, or maybe they grew up in an invalidating environment, or maybe they were abused, maybe they had trauma. But for some reason, she saw these kids as objects and not as human beings that she was charged to protect and to take care of.

she saw them as essentially objects in her environment that she didn't seem to have any attachment to. Wow. You know, the parents at the sentencing, you know, they were very upset, of course. I mean, this is a total abuse of trust, total abuse of trust. And hopefully these babies, they couldn't talk, you know, but hopefully they don't have any lasting impacts from this. You know, Angenet, this is every parent's worst nightmare. You know, when you talk to your friends, when I talk to some of my patients who have kids, and they're like, you know, both my husband and I, we have to work, we have to put our kids in daycare. We don't want to, but we have no choice.

This is the thing they're nervous about. This is the thing that keeps them up at night is making sure that their kids are safe. So when you see something like this, it's like your worst nightmare coming true. Yeah, it absolutely is. And as a mom, I can tell you, you worry when you leave your kids with somebody. I mean, you really do. And if you're, of course, paying to have somebody watch your children, dropping them off at, you know, what they call a nursery, a daycare or whatever, you trust that they're going to be cared for, especially if you're paying a lot of money for it. And that didn't happen.

And as you said, there were a lot of failures here. So, oh my God, I just can't even imagine. And we, this is not the first time we've seen a case like this. I mean, we've seen them in the United States. This is, of course, over in the UK. But we've seen stuff like this in the United States, too, where there are people taking care of children and they are out of business and they're abusing the children.

And it just goes to show you that this can happen and it can happen. and it can happen easily, especially when there's implicit trust and you drop your kids off and you think, well, you know, this person must be someone I can trust because my friends recommended them. But if someone wants to go undetected and they try to hide it and you're dealing with a population that's preverbal and there are no signs of injury and you have a staff that's lax about safeguards, it can happen. So it's horrifying. When you look at the videos of Roxanna being confronted by the police with the evidence? What do you see? And what's your analysis of her? Like you said there's a coldness there and a callousness. But what exactly are you

seeing? Because she almost looks like to me that she's being inconvenienced. Yeah, there just doesn't seem to be really any emotional reactivity there, any sense of empathy, remorse. guilt it's just not there at all and again you know we need to know what happened when this person was hired did they check references did they talk to prior employers what kind of a screening was done now listen even when you're careful things still happen people get through screenings all the time as childcare workers and they commit horrific acts so there's only so much the system can do to try to prevent this but this is clearly someone that was

flying under the radar for a long time. Her lawyer apparently said she was addicted to cannabis and she was vaping around this time. I don't know. I'm not buying it. I don't think vaping and being addicted to cannabis are mitigating factors here. I don't think they contribute to this. Your thoughts? I don't see it. You know, they could weave a story and say, you know, she had had so much anxiety about going to work that she had to use before her job to deal with the stress, but she certainly doesn't act like someone who was stressed and overwhelmed. Again, like a new first-time parent. She seemed just very cold, very detached, lacking empathy or any attachment to these kids. So I think that's going to fall pretty flat.

Yeah, and it did. I mean, it's just like she's blaming cannabis for turning her into a different person. I don't know. I don't know what kind of cannabis she was smoking, but I'm not sure it makes people violent and aggressive. And lack empathy, right? Yeah, come on. I mean, I guess like when you're a defense attorney and you've got this, you're going to work with, you're going to look for whatever you can work with, right? You've got anything on the wall and see if it's Yeah, this, this lawyer is probably like, oh, my God, like, what am I, you know. I got to think of something here. Yeah, got to think of something here, not much to work with.

And now Roxanna, Lecca, she is going to be in jail for a while. So she is going to be in prison for eight years. And I don't know, maybe that's enough. Maybe it's not. She'll be like 30 years old when she gets out, but it's horrible. She definitely should not be near any children. I would certainly hope not. And yikes, if she ever, yikes.

Yeah, I hope she is not around children. That's all. I'll leave it there. Dr. Daniel Bober, as always, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. Thanks, Anjanet. Now, I thought we should look at the clips of Roxanna Leka just one last time from her arrest to the interrogation room. Roxanne, an avocation's been made, okay, that you've been seen on a number of patients from self-children or suicide. Yeah, I've heard about that.

Yeah, but you are going to be under arrest today, okay? We need to take you to the police station yet so that you can be interviewed about it. On the mattress, he seems to be crying. Sorry, am I boring you? No, sorry, no. No, no, no, I'm listening. Pitch her mum took when she came home from nursery.

None of these injuries were there the day before, so she got those at nursery. What about these big, big red marks and bruises to her back? Any idea about those? No comment. Did you cause those? No comment. When I go through and watch the footage, am I going to see you touching her back and grabbing her back?

No comment. Anything you'd like to say? No comment. Roxana, how does that make you feel seeing injury photos on a baby? Because for me, I find that really difficult to look at, seeing clear marks on a little baby. How does that make you feel? No comment. Do you feel any sort of sadness about that?

No comment. Would you just not care? No comment. You've not told us that you. You've kicked one of the kids in the face, haven't you, so what if there was a serious injury to that baby that could have caused it more harm down the line? Four weeks later, we're here again.

Have you got any empathy for any children or any of the ones you've assaulted? No comment. You've not told us about kicking that kid in the face when we showed you the CCTV last time, did you? No comment. No, no empathy at all, is there? No remorse.

No comment. It's just completely outrageous that we have to go back to parents and say we've spoken to you and you've sat here going no comment you've shown no emotion no remorse

nothing to go back to them and say look we've seen what she's done she's shown remorse she's apologetic she said whatever you've just sat and gone no comments so I'm going to go back

to each parent and tell them we spoke to you just sat here emotionless nothing nothing at all for these babies these are children you are effectively abusing children

physically abusing children physically abusing and you have got nothing but no comments saying. I've just never seen anything like it. Unbelievable. Roxanna Leca is cold as ice. A Kingston Crown Court judge sentenced Leca to eight years in prison and barred her from ever working with children again.

So we will see what happens eight years from now. When she is released, will she ever be around children? Will she have children? We don't know. But she won't be able to hurt any children ever again. At least she won't be able to hurt any children ever again. at least she won't be able to work at a daycare, a nursery ever again. That's it for this episode of Crime Fix.

I'm Ann Jeanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.