Bouquets and cards remaining as folks spending tribute to Bob Lee in the vicinity of the Portside apartment setting up 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 advisor close to downtown San Francisco just after the two males acquired into an argument in excess of the suspect’s sister, according to court docket documents received by NBC News on Friday.
The suspect — 38-yr-outdated Nima Momeni of Emeryville, a suburb of San Francisco — drove Lee to a secluded region and stabbed him a few situations with a 4-inch kitchen area knife, which include 2 times in the upper body, according to the paperwork. At the very least one particular of the stab wounds punctured Lee’s heart.
In the wake of the dispute, Momeni’s sister sent a text to Lee, the documents demonstrate. “Just wished to make absolutely sure your doing okay Trigger [I] know nima came wayyyyyy down tricky on you,” she wrote, according to the documents.
“Thank you for being this kind of a elegant gentleman handling it with class,” she included. “Love you Egocentric pricks.”
Momeni was arrested on Thursday early morning soon after a 9-working day manhunt that captivated nationwide consideration and intensified scrutiny on community protection issues in the Bay Location.
Additional from NBC Information:
He will be billed with murder, San Francisco’s district lawyer told reporters on Thursday. He is scheduled to be arraigned on April 25, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office environment verified. He faces 26 decades to everyday living guiding bars.
The court docket documents, which the San Francisco district attorney’s business office submitted Friday as element of their attempt to detain the suspect with out bail, try to piece collectively the gatherings that led to the stabbing.
Lee and a mate interviewed by police experienced been hanging out in a lodge home in San Francisco on the evening of April 3, according to the files. The friend, recognized in the filings as Witness 1, seen Lee acquiring a conversation with Momeni.
The witness saw Momeni inquiring Lee irrespective of whether Momeni’s sister had been “doing medicine or anything inappropriate” previously that day. Lee experienced to “reassure” Momeni that “nothing at all inappropriate had happened,” according to the documents.
Afterwards that evening, a surveillance camera recorded Lee and Momeni getting into Momeni’s white BMW outside the house Momeni’s sister’s condominium. Further footage obtained by police exhibits the BMW heading to a “dim and secluded place” near downtown San Francisco.
The two gentlemen are later on viewed standing collectively on a sidewalk for a couple of minutes prior to Momeni evidently stabs Lee. When law enforcement officers arrived at the scene close to 2:30 a.m., in accordance to the documents, they discovered Lee unresponsive, lying in the road and bleeding “uncontrollably.”
“Defendant did not use some variety of pocket knife, but a cooking knife from an condominium and kitchen,” the courtroom paperwork state. “This was a planned and deliberate attack.”
Nima Momeni, the 38-yr-old founder of software program organization Grow IT, appears ahead of Judge Christine Van Aken, accused of the stabbing murder of Funds Application founder Bob Lee in a courtroom sketch in San Francisco, California, April 14, 2023. Decide Van Aken requested that Momeni be portrayed in sketches as unidentifiable to the community and jury pool.
Vicki Behringer | Reuters
The revelation that Lee and Momeni knew each other has undercut speculation that the Funds 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 lawyer, 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 as the proprietor of a tech company known as Expand IT Inc. and as a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.
On the other hand, a spokesperson for U.C. Berkeley advised NBC News on Friday that the college has “no report of graduation or attendance” for a person named Nima Momeni.
Lee had been operating as the main product or service officer of the cryptocurrency company MobileCoin. He was beforehand the main engineering officer of Sq. (now known as Block), a fiscal technological know-how firm co-founded by the previous Twitter head Jack Dorsey.
He went on to develop Cash Application, a well-recognized revenue transfer services.
Lee also was an investor in Musk’s SpaceX enterprise, as effectively as other tech corporations, this kind of as the social audio app Clubhouse, according to his LinkedIn profile.
