Fellow tech entrepreneur guilty of murdering Bob Lee in San Francisco
By Malathi Nayak
San Francisco: An acquaintance of Cash App founder Bob Lee has been found guilty of murdering him on a downtown San Francisco street in April 2023 and faces the possibility of life in prison.
A jury rejected Nima Momeni’s claim that he had stabbed Lee in self-defence after Lee, high on drugs and sleep-deprived, tried to attack him with a knife.
Jurors took seven days to deliver their verdict in the high-profile trial that featured more than a month of witness testimony.
Lee was revered by the Bay Area’s tech community as a master coder who helped develop Google’s Android and Square’s Cash App before becoming a top executive at MobileCoin.
“We think justice was done here today,” the victim’s brother, Tim Oliver Lee, told reporters. “What matters today is that we had a guilty verdict, and Nima Momeni is going away for a very long time.”
The slaying of the 43-year-old father of two drew international attention and at first fuelled speculation that he was a random victim of violence in a city falling into post-pandemic lawlessness.
The narrative shifted sharply when police arrested Momeni, a fellow technology entrepreneur who knew Lee, and accused him of a premeditated attack.
Prosecutors said Momeni planned the attack on Lee, driving him to an isolated spot under the Bay Bridge and stabbing him three times with a knife he took from his sister’s kitchen. They say Momeni was angry with Lee for introducing his younger sister to a drug dealer she says gave her GHB and other drugs and then sexually assaulted her.
The 12-person jury rejected first-degree murder and instead convicted Momeni of a lesser charge, second-degree murder, finding that the slaying was intentional but unplanned.
At trial, prosecutors had argued that Momeni was an “overprotective, wanna-be tough guy” who stabbed Lee following an argument over whether the executive acted inappropriately with Momeni’s sister, Khazar.
In his defence, Momeni told the jury Lee was the aggressor. He said that during a late night of socialising in April 2023 after they’d met for the first time two days earlier, Lee became enraged over a “bad joke” while bingeing on drugs, pulled a knife out of his jacket pocket and took a swing, before Momeni grabbed his arm and redirected the blade at his upper chest.
“I was afraid for my life,” Momeni testified under questioning from his own lawyer as he gave a blow-by-blow account of the physical confrontation that he says ended with Lee “casually” walking away, appearing to be uninjured, and Momeni throwing the knife over a fence. Lee died in hospital hours after he called 911 for help and was found bleeding from multiple wounds, including one that pierced his heart.
Witnesses recounted a party that Lee attended and left before Khazar Momeni was allegedly given a date rape drug, as well as a phone call in which Nima Momeni questioned Lee about his sister “getting naked”. Prosecutors claimed Momeni took the knife to kill Lee, while defence lawyers argued that Momeni was mad at the party host, not Lee.
Khazar, in her own testimony, sought to defend her brother but acknowledged on the stand that her memory was foggy because she’d been on a drug bender before and after Lee’s death. The jury also saw an exchange of texts between the Momeni siblings after the incident and heard from duelling forensics experts about DNA testing of the knife and how Lee was wounded.
In their closing argument, prosecutors called Momeni’s defence “a carefully crafted story”.
“The defendant murdered Bob or this is the biggest coincidence of the history of coincidences,” said Omid Talai, an assistant district attorney. “Nima Momeni must have been struck by lightning 30 times here.”
Defence attorney Saam Zanganeh told jurors “motive is everything” and that the prosecution’s version of events didn’t add up, including that Momeni deliberately took Lee to a “dark and secluded place” to kill him.
“This is in the heart of a residential-commercial area,” he said. “This is the heart of San Francisco.”
Bloomberg