Flowers and playing cards left as individuals paying tribute to Bob Lee close to the Portside residence constructing in San Francisco, California, on April 7, 2023.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu Company | Getty Photos
Money App founder Bob Lee was fatally stabbed by an IT guide close to downtown San Francisco after the 2 males bought into an argument over the suspect’s sister, based on courtroom paperwork obtained by NBC Information on Friday.
The suspect — 38-year-old Nima Momeni of Emeryville, a suburb of San Francisco — drove Lee to a secluded space and stabbed him 3 times with a 4-inch kitchen knife, together with twice within the chest, based on the paperwork. Not less than one of many stab wounds punctured Lee’s coronary heart.
Within the wake of the dispute, Momeni’s sister despatched a textual content to Lee, the paperwork present. “Simply needed to verify your doing okay Trigger [I] know nima got here wayyyyyy down arduous on you,” she wrote, based on the paperwork.
“Thanks for being such a cultured man dealing with it with class,” she added. “Love you Egocentric pricks.”
Momeni was arrested on Thursday morning after a nine-day manhunt that attracted nationwide consideration and intensified scrutiny on public questions of safety within the Bay Space.
Extra from NBC Information:
He will probably be charged with homicide, San Francisco’s district legal professional instructed reporters on Thursday. He’s scheduled to be arraigned on April 25, a spokesman for the district legal professional’s workplace confirmed. He faces 26 years to life behind bars.
The courtroom paperwork, which the San Francisco district legal professional’s workplace filed Friday as a part of their try and detain the suspect with out bail, try and piece collectively the occasions that led to the stabbing.
Lee and a buddy interviewed by police had been hanging out in a resort room in San Francisco on the night of April 3, based on the paperwork. The buddy, recognized within the filings as Witness 1, observed Lee having a dialog with Momeni.
The witness noticed Momeni asking Lee whether or not Momeni’s sister had been “doing medicine or something inappropriate” earlier that day. Lee needed to “reassure” Momeni that “nothing inappropriate had occurred,” based on the paperwork.
Later that evening, a surveillance digital camera recorded Lee and Momeni moving into Momeni’s white BMW exterior Momeni’s sister’s residence. Extra footage obtained by police exhibits the BMW heading to a “darkish and secluded space” close to downtown San Francisco.
The 2 males are later seen standing collectively on a sidewalk for a couple of minutes earlier than Momeni apparently stabs Lee. When cops arrived on the scene round 2:30 a.m., based on the paperwork, they discovered Lee unresponsive, mendacity on the street and bleeding “uncontrollably.”
“Defendant didn’t use some kind of pocket knife, however a cooking knife from an residence and kitchen,” the courtroom paperwork state. “This was a deliberate and deliberate assault.”
Nima Momeni, the 38-year-old founding father of software program firm Broaden IT, seems earlier than Choose Christine Van Aken, accused of the stabbing homicide of Money App founder Bob Lee in a courtroom sketch in San Francisco, California, April 14, 2023. Choose 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 hypothesis 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 legal professional, appeared to pin the blame for the killing on “repeat violent offenders.”
Momeni describes himself as an entrepreneur on his LinkedIn web page. He lists himself because the proprietor of a tech firm referred to as Broaden IT Inc. and as a graduate of the College of California, Berkeley.
Nonetheless, a spokesperson for U.C. Berkeley instructed NBC Information on Friday that the college has “no document of commencement or attendance” for an individual named Nima Momeni.
Lee had been working because the chief product officer of the cryptocurrency firm MobileCoin. He was beforehand the chief know-how officer of Sq. (now often called Block), a monetary know-how agency co-founded by the previous Twitter head Jack Dorsey.
He went on to create Money App, a widely known cash switch service.
Lee additionally was an investor in Musk’s SpaceX enterprise, in addition to different tech corporations, such because the social audio app Clubhouse, based on his LinkedIn profile.
