Nima Momeni appeared in court Tuesday, and his lawyer signaled that he will plead not guilty.
(Bloomberg) — The killing of Bob Lee, a technology executive and a creator of Square’s Cash App, became a focus of morbid fascination across Silicon Valley. Over the last two weeks, friends, family and prosecutors began to offer a clearer picture of Lee and the alleged murderer as two men with shared interests and overlapping social circles.
Nima Momeni, the man accused of stabbing Lee to death in San Francisco this month, appeared in court Tuesday for a hearing on his arraignment, which is now set for next week. His attorney, Paula Canny, said the evidence against Momeni doesn’t support a premeditated murder charge. He plans to enter a not guilty plea, she said.
Momeni and Lee weren’t close friends, but they were both gregarious, energetic people who enjoyed partying and women, and both had attended Burning Man, the week-long arts festival in the Nevada desert, according to people who knew them.
The pair had a shared connection: Khazar Momeni, Nima’s younger sister, who had been hanging out with Lee and other friends hours before he was killed, prosecutors said. According to two of the people who knew Nima, he was particularly protective of his sister. The relationship between Lee and Khazar may have sparked the murderous confrontation, prosecutors allege.
Lee’s killing shocked the tech industry because of his professional prominence. But his death took on added resonance in a city that’s come under widespread scrutiny over a rise in smash-and-grab theft, open-air drug use and widening income inequality. In the days after the killing, critics such as Elon Musk quickly seized on the incident as evidence that San Francisco is overrun by random street violence.
But the arrest of Momeni, 10 days later, undermined the narrative. Momeni, 38, and Lee, 43, were far from strangers, according to prosecutors.
Khazar and her brother Nima came from an Iranian-American family and were extremely close. “Those two are like guard dogs for each other,” said a friend of Nima, who, like most of the other people interviewed, asked not to be identified because of the open court case. “The idea of someone disrespecting her is very upsetting to him.”
Khazar often went by Tina, according to two acquaintances. She had known Lee for several years, according to a document filed April 14 by prosecutors arguing why Momeni shouldn’t be released from police custody. It’s unclear when Lee met Nima. What is clear, according to people who knew the men, is that they weren’t close. Lee’s ex-wife, Krista Lee, told Bloomberg in an email that “Bob had NO RELATIONSHIP with” Nima. She said because of the sensitive nature of the case, she would speak publicly at a later time.
Nima lived in Emeryville, a San Francisco suburb, and ran an IT consultancy business called Expand IT. He was a night owl and a generous friend — the kind of guy who would invite friends out to a club and if they said they couldn’t afford it, would pay for them and insist they join, according to someone who knows him.
He loves cars, is a hobbyist DJ and owns two boats, the friend said, and gets a kick out of being mysterious. If he showed up somewhere with something nice and was asked where he got it, he might wave the question off and say, “Don’t worry about it.” Nima collected decorative weaponry such as fantasy-style swords and had them displayed in his house, the friend said, though they added that they had never heard Nima even joke about using the weapons to do harm.
Last summer, police cited and released Nima, alleging battery, after a woman reported Nima had grabbed her arm and pushed her, according to an Emeryville police record. His attorney declined to comment.
On the surface, the two men had shared interests, but their core personalities were opposites, said one person who knew both of them. Lee had a warmth to him that was missing in Momeni, who was prone to bouts of verbal aggression. While both men were known for generous acts, Momeni used his flashy lifestyle as a way to draw people close to him, the person said.
In the court document, prosecutors described a Monday evening of casual revelry gone fatally awry. Lee, a longtime Bay Area resident who had recently moved to Miami, had returned to San Francisco in early April on a business trip for MobileCoin, the crypto startup where he was the chief product officer. Over the weekend, he saw friends for a birthday party dinner.
Then, on April 3, in what would become his final day alive, Lee was hanging out and drinking with friends in the afternoon at an apartment in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. One of the people at that apartment was Khazar.
After the Monday afternoon of hanging out with Khazar and others turned into evening, Lee left with a friend and headed to his hotel room nearby, according to the court document. While at the hotel, Lee spoke on the phone with Nima, who he had saved in his phone as “Nima Via Khazar.” Nima was asking Lee whether Khazar had been using drugs or doing “anything inappropriate,” and Lee told him she had not.
Early Tuesday morning, at 12:30 a.m., Lee left his friend and went to the Millennium Tower, also in the South of Market neighborhood, where Khazar lives. She and her brother were both there, and at around 2 a.m., surveillance video shows Nima and Lee riding an elevator down to the lobby together and getting into Nima’s white BMW.
On surveillance cameras four blocks away from the Millennium Tower, prosecutors describe footage from around 2:30 a.m. that shows two people talking for a few minutes, then one person lunging at the other. One gets into the BMW and speeds away, while the other lurches down the sidewalk. On nearby street cameras, Lee was seen stumbling as he walked, clutching his side.
Police later found a kitchen knife with a four-inch blade near the scene. When Lee died, the initial autopsy showed he’d been stabbed once in the hip and twice in the chest, including one stab wound that pierced his heart. On his phone, police found a text from Khazar: “Just wanted to make sure your doing ok Cause i know nima came wayyyyyy down hard on you And thank you for being such a classy man handling it with class Love you Selfish pricks”.
Later that morning, some of Lee’s friends were supposed to drive him to the airport for his flight, one person familiar with the plan said. He shared his real-time location with several friends, and when some looked at his phone’s GPS signal, they were confused to see it coming from a police station. Then the news of his killing reached them.
For a week and a half, no arrests were made in the case, which left an information vacuum as the tech industry mourned Lee. Some, including Musk, pounced on the breaking story. “Many people I know have been severely assaulted,” Musk tweeted. “Violent crime in SF is horrific.”
Then, on April 13, police raided Nima’s apartment in Emeryville and arrested him. At his initial arraignment the next morning in San Francisco, his sister Khazar attended with her husband, a plastic surgeon named Dino Elyassnia, who was once named by Town & Country Magazine as “The corrector of billionaire ‘tech necks.’” Amid a sea of news cameras and microphones, the couple formed a heart symbol with their hands and flashed it at Nima, and he returned the gesture. Khazar and her husband didn’t respond to a request for comment left with Elyassnia’s office.
People who knew Nima expressed shock at his arrest; one friend told Bloomberg that “the idea that he would commit or initiate violence is absurd.”
Still, some pundits aren’t backing down from their claim that Lee’s death shows that San Francisco is an inherently dangerous city — even though FBI crime statistics show the city has a lower rate of per-capita violent crime than many major cities. Jason Calacanis, an angel investor, mocked the reporters who asked whether he wanted to change his earlier statements about San Francisco after Nima’s arrest. Jake Shields, an MMA fighter who was friends with Lee and one of the first to tweet about his death, doubled down to a reporter: “San Francisco’s crime is completely out of control.”
The high-profile killing will continue to have different narratives projected on it, especially as more details come to light. Canny, Nima’s lawyer, said in an interview after the court appearance Tuesday that the Momeni family history included “many tribulations” and that his past was “challenging.” She suggested she would paint a broader picture of his past as part of his defense: “I’m going to tell you more about that later.”
–With assistance from Joel Rosenblatt.
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