Mayor Bill de Blasio walked back his plans to end NY’s annual J’Ouvert parade after 2 young people were shot and killed early Monday.
The annual overnight street party in Brooklyn celebrating Caribbean culture was marred by violence for the third straight year.
In a news conference on Tuesday, Mayor de Blasio said, “I think it was very clear yesterday that we were not including the option of ending something which has gone on for decades and decades”.
The mayor said officials would look into changing the hours of the overnight parade, that precedes the much bigger (and safer) West Indian American Day Parade.
The J’Ouvert parade draws up to 250,000 revelers, and is a hotbed of violence.
St. John’s University student Tiarah Poyau, 22, was walking the route of the J’Ouvert parade with three friends when she was groped by a man at around 4:15 a.m. Monday.
Poyau was upset that the man was grinding on her. “Get off me,” she told him, according to the NY Post.
Her friends, who were walking ahead of her, then heard a shot ring out. They turned around in time to see her fall at Empire Boulevard and Franklin Avenue. Poyau was shot in the eye “at close range,” a source told the Post.
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The gunman, 20-year-old Reginald Moise, was arrested in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning.
He was drunk, and his bloody hand was wrapped in a Caribbean flag, according to the Post.
Police provided more details into Moise’s movements after he shot Poyau at the parade.
Police say Moise called his girlfriend in Crown Heights, and asked her, “Would you mind if I put my gun into your apartment?”.
Inside the apartment, he drunkenly fired 2 shots into a mirror, injuring his hand.
One of the bullets passed through the wall into the adjoining apartment of a neighbor, who called 911.
Moise fled in his Ford Explorer with police units in close pursuit.
Minutes later, he crashed into 3 parked cars, losing a wheel before police stopped him around 8 a.m. at Parkside Avenue and Murray Place, according to the Post.
At the police precinct in Brooklyn, Moise told investigators he believed he shot someone accidentally at the parade, according to Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce.
“He goes, ‘The gun went off, I thought it was loaded, I’m not sure,'” said Boyce, quoting Moise. “And then he requested an attorney.”
Boyce said the gun that was recovered at the girlfriend’s apartment matched the ballistics of a 9mm aluminum-jacketed shell found at the crime scene.
“It’s not particularly common, but we’ve seen them before,” Boyce said of the aluminum-jacketed shell.
Moise, who has 5 previous arrests in his sealed juvenile record, was charged with second-degree murder, criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.
A family member said Moise was simply in “the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“The real killer is still on the loose. They have the wrong person,” the relative said.
In addition to Poyau, 17-year-old Tyreke Borel was fatally shot and two others were wounded at the parade.
Police have no suspects in those cases.
