Flowers and cards left as people paying tribute to Bob Lee near the Portside apartment constructing in San Francisco, California, on April 7, 2023.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Money App founder Bob Lee was fatally stabbed by an IT consultant near downtown San Francisco after the 2 men got into an argument over the suspect’s sister, in keeping with court documents obtained by NBC News on Friday.
The suspect — 38-year-old Nima Momeni of Emeryville, a suburb of San Francisco — drove Lee to a secluded area and stabbed him thrice with a 4-inch kitchen knife, including twice within the chest, in keeping with the documents. At the least one in every of the stab wounds punctured Lee’s heart.
Within the wake of the dispute, Momeni’s sister sent a text to Lee, the documents show. “Just desired to make sure that your doing okay Cause [I] know nima got here wayyyyyy down hard on you,” she wrote, in keeping with the documents.
“Thanks for being such a cultured man handling it with class,” she added. “Love you Selfish pricks.”
Momeni was arrested on Thursday morning after a nine-day manhunt that attracted national attention and intensified scrutiny on public questions of safety within the Bay Area.
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He shall be charged with murder, San Francisco’s district attorney told reporters on Thursday. He’s scheduled to be arraigned on April 25, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office confirmed. He faces 26 years to life behind bars.
The court documents, which the San Francisco district attorney’s office filed Friday as a part of their try and detain the suspect without bail, try and piece together the events that led to the stabbing.
Lee and a friend interviewed by police had been hanging out in a hotel room in San Francisco on the evening of April 3, in keeping with the documents. The friend, identified within the filings as Witness 1, noticed Lee having a conversation with Momeni.
The witness saw Momeni asking Lee whether Momeni’s sister had been “doing drugs or anything inappropriate” earlier that day. Lee needed to “reassure” Momeni that “nothing inappropriate had happened,” in keeping with the documents.
Later that night, a surveillance camera recorded Lee and Momeni moving into Momeni’s white BMW outside Momeni’s sister’s apartment. Additional footage obtained by police shows the BMW heading to a “dark and secluded area” near downtown San Francisco.
The 2 men are later seen standing together on a sidewalk for just a few minutes before Momeni apparently stabs Lee. When cops arrived on the scene around 2:30 a.m., in keeping with the documents, they found Lee unresponsive, lying on the street and bleeding “uncontrollably.”
“Defendant didn’t use some form of pocket knife, but a cooking knife from an apartment and kitchen,” the court documents state. “This was a planned and deliberate attack.”
Nima Momeni, the 38-year-old founding father of software company Expand IT, appears before Judge Christine Van Aken, accused of the stabbing murder of Money App founder Bob Lee in a courtroom sketch in San Francisco, California, April 14, 2023. Judge Van Aken ordered that Momeni be portrayed in sketches as unidentifiable to the general public and jury pool.
Vicki Behringer | Reuters
The revelation that Lee and Momeni knew one another has undercut speculation that the Money App creator was killed in a random act of violence.
Silicon Valley mogul Elon Musk, in a tweet that drew the condemnation of the district attorney, appeared to pin the blame for the killing on “repeat violent offenders.”
Momeni describes himself as an entrepreneur on his LinkedIn page. He lists himself because the owner of a tech company called Expand IT Inc. and as a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.
Nevertheless, a spokesperson for U.C. Berkeley told NBC News on Friday that the university has “no record of graduation or attendance” for an individual named Nima Momeni.
Lee had been working because the chief product officer of the cryptocurrency company MobileCoin. He was previously the chief technology officer of Square (now often called Block), a financial technology firm co-founded by the previous Twitter head Jack Dorsey.
He went on to create Money App, a well known money transfer service.
Lee also was an investor in Musk’s SpaceX enterprise, in addition to other tech corporations, equivalent to the social audio app Clubhouse, in keeping with his LinkedIn profile.
