Two teenage brothers, one 15-years-old and the other a year younger, are now in after allegedly carjacking a Nashville woman at gunpoint on Monday morning and firing shots at her hours later when she spotted them driving in the stolen vehicle.
Quaneishia Wiggins says she was on her way to work early Monday morning just after 4 a.m. when she noticed a car driving erratically. She honked her horn as she drove past the vehicle, but noticed when she pulled in to work that the vehicle was now following her. When she opened her driver’s side door, Wiggins says a juvenile in a ski mask and holding a gun ran up, with two others close behind. They demanded her phone, wallet, and keys before quickly speeding off in her Dodge Journey.
After reporting the carjacking to police, Wiggins says she received an alert on her phone a few hours later that someone was trying to use her bank card at a couple of gas stations. Wiggins and her fiancé got in his car and began driving around the area where the card had been used in the hopes of spotting her stolen ride, and amazingly stumbled across the vehicle in front of them.
“I said babe, that’s the car. So, I immediately call the police, 911.”
While on the phone, Wiggins says, the teens started “literally shooting, the passenger is shooting at us, because they seen, they ran the stop sign, they seen me go through. They like ‘yea she following us.’”
Wiggins said that’s when she started firing her own gun back at the fleeing suspects before the teens crashed the stolen SUV head-on into a car on Kings Lane.
“If you are a teenager at 4 o’clock in the morning, you should be getting ready for high school or school, not out jacking people for their cars,” said Wiggins. “Then for it be kids, just think if I did have my gun and I shot and they shot and we going back and forth at my job and they could have killed me, or I could have killed somebody, because somebodies kids out jacking people.”
When police responded to the crash, they quickly located two of the teens hiding out in some nearby woods, as well as three other stolen vehicles they believe might have a connection to the suspects.
Now the pair are facing charges of aggravated robbery, though they’ve been charged as juveniles for the time being, which means that any actual consequences from the legal system are likely to be fairly light. It’s also unknown if police are looking for a third suspect, as Wiggins described, or if they believe it was just the two teens who were responsible for the carjacking and shooting.
Thankfully Wiggins and her fiancé were unhurt during their surprise encounter with the carjackers. While some anti-gunners might claim that Wiggins was acting as a vigilante, it doesn’t sound like she was out driving around looking for vengeance. She was just looking for her car, and as soon as she spotted it she called police in the hopes that law enforcement would be able to respond and recover it. According to her interview with WKRN in Nashville, she didn’t draw her own gun until the suspects started shooting at her first, and she didn’t continue the confrontation after they’d crashed her car.
Those aren’t the actions of a trigger-happy vigilante. Quaneishia Wiggins sounds like an ordinary citizen who was hoping to lead police to her stolen vehicle and had the presence of mind to have her firearm with her just in case she ran across the armed teens who took it from her at gunpoint hours earlier. It was a wise decision, and may very well have helped to save her life.