(Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office)
A second Wisconsin woman connected to the shooting of a 9-year-old girl has avoided prison time after pleading guilty in a child neglect case.
Vanta’jah Westmoreland, 24, pleaded guilty to three counts of being a party to a crime of child neglect. She was sentenced Friday to two years of probation. The charges stemmed from a Nov. 8, 2024, shooting inside a Milwaukee apartment where four young children had allegedly been left without adult supervision.
Westmoreland was the girlfriend of 29-year-old Nakia Piggee, the mother of the child who was shot. Police said Westmoreland and Piggee left the 9-year-old girl, an 8-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a disabled 2-year-old alone for about 40 minutes while they went grocery shopping.
Piggee later called 911 to report that her daughter had been shot. When officers arrived, the girl was found lying face-down on the living room floor with a gunshot wound to her upper right back. She was conscious and able to communicate with police.
At first, Piggee reportedly said she did not know who shot the child. When police spoke to the injured girl, she indicated the shooter was male and pointed toward the 4-year-old boy sitting in the kitchen. The girl then began to “gurgle and cough,” prompting an officer to apply a chest seal before she was taken to a hospital. She survived.
Westmoreland told police that a 16-year-old neighbor had taken the gun from the apartment and brought it to his own home “so no one would get in trouble.” Officers later found a 9 mm HiPoint wrapped in black sweatpants inside the neighbor’s apartment.
During a protective sweep, police described the apartment as “filthy and littered with food, dirty clothes, cigarettes’ ashes, and plastic bottles.” In a bedroom, officers found “liquor bottles, ashes, ash trays, and diapers.”
The disabled 2-year-old was found in a crib in that room with casts on both arms, a feeding tube in his stomach, and supplemental oxygen. Police also found a 9 mm Hornady Luger casing between the crib and a dirty queen-size mattress, along with a bloody T-shirt with “an apparent bullet strike” and a bloody blanket.
Investigators said the 4-year-old boy told police that his “aunt Kiki,” a nickname used by Piggee, kept the gun under the bed. The 8-year-old allegedly told officers the gun went off after she took it from the boy.
Detectives wrote that they found no firearm safety items, such as a “trigger lock or a firearm safe.” Piggee later said the gun belonged to Westmoreland and had been 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 child neglect counts and was also sentenced to two years of probation.
