CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A mother who attacked a 14-year-old girl with a shovel at an RTA station in May was sentenced Wednesday to two years in prison.

Monique Gardner, 39, cried as she told Common Pleas Court Judge Pamela Barker that she struck the girl with a flathead shovel three times to protect her teenage daughter, who said a group of teenagers who beat her up earlier that day followed her from school to the West 65th Street Rapid Station.

Gardner, who claimed in earlier statements that a stranger working on a house near the station handed her the shovel, went from “protector” to “aggressor" during the May 22 attack, which a bystander recorded on cellphone video.

“I love my kids,” Gardner told Barker. “It’s my job to protect them. I went about doing it the wrong way. I wish I had a chance to just do it over again.”

Gardner pleaded guilty to felonious assault and endangering children last month. She faced a maximum sentence of eight years in prison.

A group of girls jump Gardner’s daughter now-17-year-old daughter at her CMSD school earlier in the day in another altercation that was recorded on cellphone video. Gardner’s lawyer, Kevin Spellacy, played that video for Barker in court.

It showed Gardner’s daughter at the bottom of a pile of teenage girls whose arms and legs flailed as they delivered blows in a hallway.

“She used extremely poor judgment," Spellacy said. “But with this as a backdrop judge, I don’t think it’s hard for any parent to understand the emotions that took over that day.”

Later that day, Gardner’s daughter said the same group of girls followed her on her route home, and she called her mother for help. Gardner, who was nearby, rushed over to the station and was handed the shovel by the man, Spellacy said.

That video, which was also played in court Wednesday, showed Gardner wielding a shovel as her daughter wrestled the 14-year-old off a table and tackled her to the ground. Gardner followed and took two full swings at the girl, striking her in the leg and in the neck. The sound of the metal shovel head striking the station’s concrete floor echoed in the lobby.

The girl who recorded the interaction on her cellphone from several feet away could be heard saying Gardner was going to jail, and Gardner turned, cursed at her and cocked the shovel back as though she were about to swing at her. The teen behind the phone backed away and recorded Gardner delivering one last strike to the girl on the floor before the video ended.

“If that is being a good mother, taking her child to a fight, and hitting a child with a shovel, your honor, this person does belong in prison," Radigan said.

Barker called Gardner’s conduct “outrageous,” even considering the earlier beating her daughter received. Barker said Gardner could have called the police, or just taken her daughter out of the RTA station, without “beating on a young person with a shovel several times and then threatening to strike others.”

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