Insets (left to right): Vanta”jah Westmoreland and Nakia Piggee (Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office). Background: The Milwaukee, Wis., apartment where a 9-year-old girl was shot in 2024 (Google Maps).
A second Wisconsin woman connected to the shooting of a 9-year-old girl has been spared prison.
Vanta’jah Westmoreland, 24, pleaded guilty Friday to three counts of party to a crime of child neglect and was sentenced to two years of probation. Prosecutors filed the charges over the Nov. 8, 2024, shooting of a 9-year-old girl inside a Milwaukee apartment, where three other children were also present. According to a criminal complaint reviewed by Law&Crime, Westmoreland was the girlfriend of 29-year-old Nakia Piggee, the wounded child’s mother.
Investigators said the two adults left the 9-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a disabled 2-year-old alone for roughly 40 minutes while they went grocery shopping.
Officers were sent to the apartment after Piggee called 911 to report that her daughter had been shot. At first, Piggee told authorities she did not know who fired the weapon. Police found the girl face-down on the living room floor with a gunshot wound to her upper right back, though she was still conscious and able to speak.
When officers interviewed the child, she said the shooter was a male and then pointed toward the 4-year-old boy who had been inside the apartment with her and was seated in a kitchen chair. The girl soon began to “gurgle and cough,” prompting an officer to place a chest seal over the wound before she was taken to a hospital. She survived the shooting.
During questioning, Westmoreland told police she was Piggee’s girlfriend and said a 16-year-old neighbor had removed the gun from the apartment and taken it to his own home “so no one would get in trouble.”
While conducting a protective sweep, officers realized the home was “filthy and littered with food, dirty clothes, cigarettes’ ashes, and plastic bottles.” When they got to the bedroom, they found “liquor bottles, ashes, ash trays, and diapers.”
Inside the bedroom was a crib containing the 2-year-old, who had casts on each arm, a feeding tube in his stomach, and supplemental oxygen to breathe. In the same room, police found a 9 mm Hornady Luger casing on the floor between the crib and a dirty, queen-size mattress, as well as a bloody T-shirt with “an apparent bullet strike” and a bloody blanket. The gun, a 9 mm HiPoint, was later found in the neighbor’s apartment, wrapped in a pair of black sweatpants.
Police asked the 4-year-old boy about the gun, and he said his “aunt Kiki,” a nickname used by Piggee, kept it under the bed. The boy reportedly told his mother that it was the 8-year-old girl who fired the shot. The 8-year-old told police that she took the gun from the boy after he found it under the mattress and then the gun went off. Police asked her how she was holding the gun when that happened, and she “seemed nervous and paused” before blaming the shooting on the boy.
Detectives wrote in the complaint that there was no evidence of any firearm safety items, such as a “trigger lock or a firearm safe.” Piggee later said the gun was owned by Westmoreland and kept under the mattress, but she “forgot it was there.”
Local Fox affiliate WITI reported that Piggee pleaded guilty in April 2025 to two misdemeanor counts of child neglect and was sentenced to two years of probation.
