Puyallup mom who attacked child molester with baseball bat pleads guilty to assault

A Puyallup woman who became an Internet hero last year after she beat a convicted child molester with a baseball bat pleaded guilty Monday to assault.

Tammy Lee Gibson pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, according to Pierce County Deputy Prosecutor Sunni Ko. She was originally charged with second-degree assault and felony harassment.

Gibson will be sentenced on Feb. 27 and could face a sentence of three to eight months in jail, Ko said.

The 40-year-old woman said she attacked William Baldwin, 24, in June after hearing from Pierce County Sheriff's Department that a registered sex offender had moved into a nearby trailer park.

Gibson remembered seeing Baldwin speak to her 10-year-old daughter a year earlier and went to his home, threatening to kill him. She then struck the 7-foot-3 man with an aluminum bat several times.

Baldwin was also arrested after the attack for failing to notify police of his new location. He had earlier been convicted of two counts of first-degree child molestation for sexually assaulting two girls when he was a teenager.

Gibson had been previously arrested for drug possession.

After the attack on Baldwin, Gibson was celebrated on message boards and blogs for protecting her daughter. Prosecutors and police, however, condemned the attack, warning others not to take the law into their own hands.

At the time, Gibson told The Seattle Times that she had one regret about the attack: She said she wished she had done more damage.

"I go nuts in jail, but I straight would not do anything different," she said in a June interview.

Sharon Pian Chan: 206-464-2958.