Muhiyidin Moye, Black Lives Matter Activist, Is Shot and Killed in New Orleans

A prominent Black Lives Matter activist was shot and killed while riding a bike in New Orleans early on Tuesday morning.

The activist, Muhiyidin Moye, 32, is known for leaping across yellow police tape to snatch a Confederate battle flag from a demonstrator in Charleston, S.C., last year, an act that was captured on a live news broadcast. But Mr. Moye, who also went by the last name d’Baha, had spent years fighting for racial equality as an activist and protester.

The police found Mr. Moye bleeding near a mountain bike on Bienville Street in New Orleans shortly after 1 a.m. on Tuesday. He had been shot in the leg, and the police report said officers followed a trail of blood that led them back to a bullet fragment a few blocks away from where Mr. Moye was found.

He was taken to a nearby hospital where he died of his wounds, and the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office called the death a homicide. It remains unclear whether Mr. Moye was intentionally targeted, and the police did not answer questions about whether any suspect had been identified.

“The incident is the subject of an active and ongoing investigation,” said Beau Tidwell, a spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department. New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the United States, with 157 murders in 2017.

Mr. Moye was originally from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., but lived in the Charleston area and was visiting New Orleans at the time of his death, his sister Kimberli Duncan, 46, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

“He was always fighting for justice, equality and fairness,” she said. “He always wanted to do for others. He never put himself first.”

In 2015, Mr. Moye demonstrated on behalf of the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was fatally shot by a police officer in North Charleston that April.

Two months after that, nine black churchgoers in Charleston were murdered by the white supremacist Dylann S. Roof. Mr. Moye participated in demonstrations and spoke to news outlets about the history of racial inequality in the United States.

And when Donald J. Trump went to Mount Pleasant, a city near Charleston, for a campaign rally in December 2015, calling for “a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” Mr. Moye was there, too, in protest.

“You would think we’d learn from history,” he told The New York Times, adding that his father was a Muslim.

Last year, when Mr. Moye tried to wrest the Confederate flag from a demonstrator, he did not succeed. The police surrounded him, eventually bringing him down to the ground and then arresting him. But after the video of his flying leap spread online, he told The Washington Post that he had tried to take the flag away from the demonstrator to “help them understand what it is to meet a real resistance, to meet people that aren’t scared.”

Ms. Duncan said her family was still waiting for answers about what happened to Mr. Moye, and she hoped his activism would inspire others to keep working for racial equality. “I’d like to keep up his dream, keep up his faith,” she said. “He was absolutely serious about it.”