Kindergarten kidnapper tells girl, ‘I’m not a monster’

PHILADELPHIA >> A girl abducted from her kindergarten classroom and sexually tortured during a bizarre overnight ordeal faced her kidnapper in court Monday and asked a judge to stop her from harming others.

“I think what she did to me was wrong, and I think she shouldn’t do it to anyone else,” the now 8-year-old said, standing beside her mother and speaking in a sweet, pipsqueak voice.

Former day care worker Christina Regusters was sentenced to 40 years to life by a judge who called the January 2013 crime “a horror show.”

Regusters, 22, insisted Monday that her only role in the crime had been to take the 5-year-old from unnamed people and leave her half-naked the next morning on a cold, dark playground a few miles away. A stranger heard the child’s cries before dawn and found her shivering under the playground equipment.

“I’m not a monster, I’m a very good person,” said Regusters, who was convicted of kidnapping, sexual assault and other charges at a trial last summer. “I take full responsibility for what happened and doing absolutely nothing about it.”

Regusters did not testify at trial and did not say Monday who else was purportedly involved.

Authorities believe she donned a Muslim dress and veil to impersonate the girl’s mother at school and then posed as three different people to trick the blindfolded child into thinking a man committed the sexual assault.

Prosecutors sought a life sentence, saying Regusters had previously watched anime involving child torture and done research on how to destroy DNA evidence. The defendant later told a defense psychiatrist that she had been abused and neglected as a child and raped during a 2012 home invasion.