Merisa Wagner appears in a booking photo. (Marathon County)
A Wisconsin woman will spend the next several years in state prison for running an unlicensed day care and committing severe child abuse that resulted in a 16-month-old girl suffering from bleeding in her brain.
Merisa Wagner, 33, who is also known as Merisa Sell, was sentenced to six years behind bars nearly four months after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors in Marathon County. The finality of the case comes almost five years after she was arrested and charged – and some eight years after she was first accused of child abuse.
On Friday, Marathon County Circuit Court Judge LaMont Jacobson sentenced Wagner to four years in prison for child abuse – intentionally causing great bodily harm, and two years in prison on a lesser charge of intentional child abuse, the paper reports. A third intentional child abuse charge was dismissed during a June plea hearing in exchange for the defendant accepting legal culpability.
The defendant previously operated Merisa’s Stepping Stones Daycare out of her residence on Stark Street in Wausau, a medium-sized city and the county seat, located in the “Northcentral” region of the Badger State, according to the Wausau Pilot & Review.
Wagner was initially prosecuted under her old last name “Sell.” She was also charged in a separate case with a modifier of “physical abuse of a child by a child care provider.” That case was later consolidated into the others, according to court records reviewed by Law&Crime.
Divorce records show that Wagner recently had her divorce finalized – which explains the surname differences in her cases.
According to the Pilot, Wagner was first accused of abusing a 4-month-old baby boy over an incident that occurred in 2015.
In that first incident, the victim suffered a seizure and was also diagnosed with a brain injury. The defendant would allegedly go on to tell investigators that the child’s injuries probably occurred because an older boy shook the infant while he was in a bouncy swing.
In 2017, Wagner was accused of child abuse for the second time.
On that occasion, the mother of a boy in Wagner’s care reported that her son had fingerprint-like bruises on his upper thigh. In both of those first two alleged incidents, however, the Marathon County District Attorney’s Office declined to bring charges, according to the paper.
But those earlier allegations came to light amidst the latest ones.
In August 2018, Wagner herself called 911 and said the toddler at the center of her charges was having trouble breathing. The day care provider cleared the girl’s airways and tried to remedy the issue. The girl’s mother even, at first, declined to take her child to the emergency room – likely based on how Wagner described the injury. The defendant said the girl fell out of her high chair and choked on some food she was eating. Later that same night, the girl was being treated by doctors in a hospital as her condition steadily deteriorated.
Hospital staff found injuries consistent with child abuse. Aside from bleeding outside of her brain, the girl had injuries to her mouth and unexplained bruising. In a court document obtained by Wausau-based ABC affiliate WAOW, the doctor who examined the toddler wrote: “The subdural hemorrhage is a concern for inflicted trauma.”
As it turned out, the defendant had been fired from two other day care facilities and her own business was not licensed. According to WAOW, Wagner made a Facebook post to sell all of her childcare materials after the toddler was determined to have a brain bleed.
Doctors believed the toddler was likely shaken, the Pilot reports.
The case, first filed in November 2018, was originally scheduled for trial in 2019. Several years of delays ensued. In 2020, the judge overseeing the case ordered the state to comply with an enhanced defense discovery request. Jury trials scheduled for December 2020 and April 2022 were also scuttled, court records show.
Wagner received a certain measure of leniency from the court. She faced a maximum sentence of 46 years behind bars for both offenses she admitted to committing. The sentences will be served consecutively, or one after another. The defendant remained free on bond for the long pendency of the proceedings against her. The judge did, however, credit her with four days in jail as time served.
She will also be subject to 10 years of extended supervision once she is released from prison – and she will be prohibited from ever running a day care or taking care of any other vulnerable person.
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