Consultant charged with murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee claims tech titan attacked him
The man accused of killing Cash App founder Bob Lee claimed a “bad joke” about family and strip clubs caused the tech entrepreneur to fly into a rage and charge him with a knife – testifying that he was left no choice but to defend himself.
Nima Momeni, 40, told San Francisco jurors he cracked a joke to a drug-addled Lee just after 2 a.m. on April 4, 2023, saying he might be better off spending the rest of the night with his family rather than looking for a strip club to party at – causing Lee to go from “zero to 100” and pull out a knife.
“You could see the anger,” Momeni testified Wednesday in his first public comments on the incident.
Lee, 43, walked away after they struggled over the blade — apparently showing no signs of injury — and it wasn’t until the following day he learned Lee had been found stumbling around San Francisco with stab wounds before dying, Momeni said.
Before the stabbing, the pair had been having a drug-fueled party at the home of Momeni’s married sister, Khazar Elyassnia — with whom Lee was allegedly sleeping.
Momeni said he and Lee were on friendly terms when they were ordred out of the apartment by Elyassnia. As they drove off in Momenu’s BMW, Lee began searching on his phone for somewhere to keep partying.
Then they hit a pothole and Lee spilled a beer he was carrying, and Momeni pulled over the car. Lee climbed out of the vehicle, and Momeni followed thinking he was going Lee to throw up.
That was when Momeni said he cracked the joke.
“If I knew this was my last night in town, I would spend it with my family instead of [expletive] around at a strip club,” Momeni recalled saying during his second day on the stand Thursday, according to NBC Bay Area.
Lee – who the defense claims had only slept six hours over a four-day bender of his own — allegedly flipped out and came at Momeni with the blade.
Somewhere in that struggle, Lee was apparently stabbed three times, Momeni testified.
“I’m not sure why he pulled it out,” Momeni said when prosecutors scoffed at the story during cross examination. “I was in fear for my life.”
As soon as he learned what happened, Momeni lawyered up.
“He’s a big famous guy,” he said. “I’m just an average joe, an immigrant.”
A kitchen knife was later found at the scene of the struggle, with Momeni’s DNA on the handle and Lee’s on the blade. Investigators determined it had been taken from a set at Elyassnia’s apartment.
Security footage from the apartment elevator also showed the two men leaving on what appeared to be good terms, while a grainy clip taken near the Bay Bridge captured them getting out of a car.
Prosecutors, however, have argued that Momeni – allegedly enraged over an incident where his sister was possibly drugged and sexually assaulted at a party Lee attended – drove the tech founder to a secluded place so he could stab him to death as an act of vengeance.
Momeni and his sister were reportedly extremely close since they immigrated from Iran with their mother as children.
Lee – a divorced father of two daughters – was found with ketamine and other hard drugs in his system at the time of his death, and was reportedly part of a hard-partying, sexually-swinging social scene with Momeni’s sister.
If convicted, Lee faces 26 years to life. He plead not guilty.
