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 linked to the shooting of a 9-year-old girl will avoid prison time.
Vanta’jah Westmoreland, 24, pleaded guilty to three counts of being party to a crime of child neglect and was sentenced to two years of probation on Friday. The charges were brought against Westmoreland in connection with the shooting of a 9-year-old girl, who was with three other children at a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, apartment on Nov. 8, 2024. According to a criminal complaint reviewed by Law&Crime, Westmoreland was the girlfriend of 29-year-old Nakia Piggee, who is the mother of the girl who was shot.
Police said the two adults left the 9-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a disabled 2-year-old by themselves for about 40 minutes to go grocery shopping.
Officers arrived at the scene after Piggee called 911 to report the shooting. Initially, Piggee said she did not know who shot her daughter, who was found lying face-down on the floor of the home’s living room. She had a gunshot wound to her upper right back, but was conscious and able to communicate.
When police spoke to the victim, she indicated that the shooter was a male, then pointed at the 4-year-old boy who was in the apartment with her, sitting on a chair in the kitchen. The girl began to “gurgle and cough,” so an officer applied a chest seal to her wound and she was transported to the hospital. She ultimately survived.
Police questioned Westmoreland, who identified herself as Piggee’s girlfriend. She told police that a 16-year-old neighbor took the gun out of the apartment and brought it to his apartment “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.
