Global Courant 2023-05-19 01:10:14
The suspect in the murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee pleaded not guilty in a San Francisco court on Thursday.
Nima Momeni, a fellow tech executive, has been accused of killing Lee with a kitchen knife last month after driving him to a remote area.
The judge ordered Momeni to be held without bail.
Paula Canny, Momeni’s attorney, said after the hearing that Lee’s death was the result of a mix of self-defense and accidental injury.
“There was no premeditation,” Canny said.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins rejected that story, saying Momeni intended to kill Lee.
“We believe this was an intentional homicide,” Jenkins said. “Mr. Momeni’s DNA is on the handle of that knife.”
Jenkins said Momeni is a flight risk because he is a person of resources and “anyone capable of violently killing anyone is a risk to public safety”.
Momeni, 38, appears to be the owner of an Emeryville, California-based company called Expand IT.
Lee, an executive at cryptocurrency company MobileCoin, was killed in the early morning hours of April 4 in San Francisco’s Rincon Hill neighborhood, San Francisco police said last month.
Bob Lee, founder of Cash App and former Square executive,
Handout
The previous afternoon, Lee spent time with Momeni’s sister and a witness, who identified himself as a close friend of Lee’s, prosecutors said. Prosecutors have not named the witness.
Later in the day, in Lee’s hotel room, he had a conversation with Momeni in which he asked Lee if his sister was “using drugs or anything inappropriate,” the witness told police, according to the document.
Lee assured Momeni that nothing inappropriate had happened, the witness told police.
Early the next morning, around 2 a.m., CCTV footage showed Lee and Momeni leaving Lee’s hotel and getting into Momeni’s car, a BMW Z4, prosecutors said.
Video showed the BMW driving to a remote and dark place where the two men got out of the car. Momeni “moved toward” Lee and the BMW sped away from the crime scene, according to the court document.
Police later found an approximately 4-inch knife at the crime scene that appeared to have blood on it, the document said.
The doctor who performed the autopsy found that Lee had been stabbed three times, including one blow that pierced his heart, the document said.
London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, said in a statement to ABC News last month that Lee’s death marks a “terrible tragedy.”
