(Bloomberg) -- One and a half years after the fatal stabbing of technology executive Bob Lee on a downtown San Francisco street drew nationwide attention, his accused killer is going on trial — and is set to argue he acted in self-defense.
Lee was revered by the Bay Area’s tech community as a master coder who helped develop Google’s Android and Square’s Cash App before becoming a top executive at MobileCoin. The slaying of the 43-year-old father of two at first fueled speculation that he was a random victim of violence in a city falling into post-pandemic lawlessness.
The narrative shifted sharply when police arrested fellow technology entrepreneur Nima Momeni, who knew Lee, and charged him with premeditated murder, alleging that the men got into an argument over Momeni’s sister, Khazar.
Now, Momeni’s defense team is poised to tell a jury in opening arguments Monday that Lee was the aggressor. The defense will argue that after all three were socializing at Khazar’s luxury apartment and the men left, Lee used a kitchen knife to attack Momeni, who then turned the knife on Lee. Lee later died in the hospital from stab wounds that punctured his heart and lung.
It’s unclear whether jurors will hear from Momeni, 40, who ran an IT consulting business and had previous run-ins with police including one over his alleged stabbing of a couple of teenagers in 2005. But Khazar could be a key witness, as she was in an overlapping social circle with the two men, both of whom were known to enjoy partying.
The trial marks a high-profile test for San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who had been a prosecutor in the office for seven years before she was appointed to her post by Mayor London Breed with a tough-on-crime agenda, following the 2022 recall of progressive DA Chesa Boudin.
But a verdict in the Momeni case is unlikely before Jenkins faces voters on Nov. 5 in her bid to be elected to a four-year term. Her office has said the trial could take two months, with testimony scheduled four days a week.
Prosecutors contend Nima Momeni planned to kill Lee following a dispute over Khazar. They’ve cited testimony from a friend who was socializing with Lee the day before the incident, video footage of the men leaving Khazar’s apartment building and driving away in Momeni’s BMW and DNA testing of the knife found near the scene of the stabbing.
They also pointed to a text Khazar had sent Lee the next morning, apparently unaware of his death: “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.”
Momeni’s lawyers argue that prosecutors have misinterpreted his motivations and bungled their forensic testing.
They argue that Momeni wouldn’t have been angry at Lee, but at another man who had hosted a party where Khazar allegedly took a date-rape drug. She was later seen waking up, crying and calling her husband and Nima for a ride home.
The defense also claims the DNA testing of the knife was incomplete and unreliable and missed that Lee was holding the knife when he was stabbed.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harry Dorfman, who last year ordered Momeni to stand trial, said at the time that he viewed the evidence against the defendant as “very strong.” A different judge is overseeing the jury trial.
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