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Flatbush Man Charged With J'Ouvert Murder of Tiarah Poyau

 Tiarah Poyau, 22, was shot and killed at Monday's J'Ouvert festival.
Tiarah Poyau, 22, was shot and killed at Monday's J'Ouvert festival.
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Facebook/Tiarah Poyau

CROWN HEIGHTS — A Flatbush man has been charged with murder, reckless endangerment and multiple weapons charges in the fatal shooting of Tiarah Payou, the 22-year-old Brooklyn accounting student killed during J’Ouvert on Monday.

Regenald Moise, 20, is being held without bail after his arrest Tuesday in the shooting of Payou, who was celebrating with three girlfriends around 4 a.m. at the pre-dawn Caribbean carnival celebration in Crown Heights when she was shot in the face and killed.

The fatal shooting was the beginning of a series of reckless moves by Moise to flee the scene and stash the .9mm handgun that included a second shooting at a Montgomery Street apartment building and ended with the 20-year-old drunkenly crashing into three cars — where police promptly took him into custody, police and prosecutors said.

Payou was shot at “point blank” range while walking along Empire Boulevard near McKeever Place at 4:14 a.m., police said.

Directly after the shooting, Moise told a friend “‘I think I shot somebody’ and ‘I didn’t know the gun was loaded,’” according to an account of the investigation by NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce. Soon after, he made a phone call to a friend, asking her, “Would you mind if I put my gun in your apartment?”

When he got to her apartment, located on Montgomery Street between Nostrand and New York avenues, Moise fired at least two rounds inside the apartment with the same gun, he told police, hitting a wall and a bedroom in an adjacent apartment where a person was sleeping, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney's office.

He also broke a mirror and cut his hand, Boyce said.

He then left the Montgomery Street apartment in a car, driving to Parkside Avenue where he hit three other vehicles.

"He’s driving on three wheels, apparently intoxicated," with a bloodied hand, Boyce said after his arrest on Tuesday. When investigators spoke with Moise, he told detectives "he thinks he shot somebody," Boyce said, then asked for a lawyer.

Police have linked a .9mm aluminum shell casing found at the scene of the Payou shooting to two bullets recovered inside the Montgomery Street apartment, Boyce and court records say.

Moise was arraigned Wednesday night and is due back in court on Sept. 12, court documents show. His attorney, Christopher Hoyt, did not respond to an inquiry about the charges.

Payou was described by Boyce as a “stellar person” who was apparently an innocent bystander in the fatal shooting. Before her death, the East New York resident had interned at the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers this year and in 2015, the company said. She also studied accounting at St. Johns University, according to her LinkedIn profile, and at Medgar Evers Preparatory School for high school.

About a half-hour before Poyau was struck and killed, a second victim, Tyreke Borel, 17, was fatally shot in a gang-related shootout on the J’Ouvert parade route; a 72-year-old woman was injured in that shooting, as well, police said.

No suspect has yet been identified in that shooting as of Thursday, police said.

Both shootings happened in the midst of a heavy police presence at the annual pre-West Indian Day Parade festival, put in place by the NYPD following the death of two people at last year’s J’Ouvert, including a top aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, 43-year-old Carey Gabay.