Bob Lee's killing: Nima Momeni charged with murder of Cash App founder
Cash App founder Bob Lee was killed by someone he knew, say city officials who sought to dispel the notion that it was a random act of violence.
Nine days after the fatal stabbing, authorities announced the arrest of 38-year-old tech consultant Nima Momeni, who was booked Thursday in San Francisco jail and charged with murder.
Lee was found on a city sidewalk in the early morning of April 4 with multiple stab wounds. The killing of an entrepreneur well known in the Silicon Valley world shook San Francisco residents, and in the absence of an immediate suspect, some figures — including Twitter owner Elon Musk — cast Lee’s killing as symptomatic of a city overrun by random street crime.
At a news conference Thursday afternoon, law enforcement officials disputed that notion.
“This has nothing to do with San Francisco,” said San Francisco police Chief William Scott. “This has to do with human nature.”
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The arrest sparked questions about Momeni and his relationship with Lee. According to San Francisco news outlet Mission Local, which first reported Momeni’s arrest, police believe that before the stabbing the two men rode in a car together and that a confrontation had escalated between them.
At Momeni’s Emeryville apartment building on Thursday, Chris Donatiello said he was woken up around 5 a.m. by the sound of half a dozen police officers ordering Momeni out of his home. Like other neighbors, Donatiello described him as an affable and gregarious neighbor who frequently gave a friendly wave in the parking lot where Momeni kept his small sailboat.
Another neighbor, Emily Pia, said Momeni enjoyed partying and was one of the nicest people she knew in the building. His next-door neighbor, public-relations strategist Sam Singer, described Momeni as a warm man who kept a pool table in his office and sometimes played music while he worked that could be heard through their shared wall.
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Though the gray walls of the apartment building’s winding hallways are mostly bare, a print of Marilyn Monroe hung outside the front door of Momeni’s rented unit.
Momeni’s business, ExpandIT, has offices in Emeryville and San Mateo. The tech entrepreneur previously worked as a tech consultant and attended the University of California at Berkeley, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In the immediate aftermath of Lee’s killing, some in the tech industry, including Musk, took to Twitter and cited the incident as evidence of a dangerous city spiraling downward, even though crime data show violent crime in San Francisco is relatively low.
Share this articleShare“Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately,” Musk tweeted.
City officials on Thursday pushed back at Musk, who has been working out of Twitter’s San Francisco office since he bought the company in October.
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“As you already heard, Mr. Lee was murdered by somebody that he knew,” said Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney. “I must point out that reckless and irresponsible statements like those contained in Mr. Musk’s tweet that assumed incorrect circumstances about Mr. Lee’s death serve to mislead the world in their perceptions of San Francisco.”
Lee, 43, and known to his friends as “Crazy Bob,” was chief product officer at MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency company. In interviews with The Washington Post, friends described Lee as a warmhearted and tenacious entrepreneur whose goal was to better the world through his financial technology endeavors.
Lee’s brother, Tim Oliver Lee, posted on Facebook Thursday that the family is “very thankful” to the SFPD detectives.
“Our next steps will be to work with the District Attorney’s office to ensure that this person is not allowed to hurt anyone else or walk free,” read the post, which was signed “From the Family of Bob Lee.”
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Lee also worked on Android at Google before working to help small businesses with Square and launching Cash App, which has become one of the most popular mobile payment apps, enabling people to directly send one another money.
Lee was a “hardcore, purpose-driven person,” said Mark R. Hatch, a fellow Silicon Valley CEO who met Lee when he ran a TechShop for makers. “The underlying thread, I believe, is this incredible passion for humanity and the desire to change it to the good.”
In the family’s statement, Lee is described as a generous colleague and friend who loved music and art and helped people with his skills.
“Bob loved being in San Francisco, and San Francisco loved Bob,” they wrote. “Walking down the street would sometimes be difficult because every young person with a dream would search him out, and he would make time for every one.”
Mark reported from Washington, D.C., Velazco from San Francisco and O’Donovan from Emeryville, Calif. Rachel Lerman contributed additional reporting.
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