A 24-year-old Milwaukee woman received two years of probation after pleading guilty to child neglect charges connected to a 2024 shooting that wounded a 9-year-old girl.
Vanta'jah Westmoreland was sentenced Friday in connection with the Nov. 8, 2024, incident at a Milwaukee apartment. She and Nakia Piggee, the mother of the injured girl, left four children unsupervised for about 40 minutes while they went grocery shopping.
An 8-year-old girl found a 9 mm handgun under a mattress and the weapon discharged, striking the 9-year-old in the upper right back. The victim survived. Police later recovered the gun from a neighbor's apartment.
Westmoreland pleaded guilty to three counts of being party to a crime of child neglect. Piggee had earlier pleaded guilty in April 2025 to two misdemeanor counts of child neglect and also received two years of probation.