The man accused of fatally stabbing Cash App founder Bob Lee has pleaded not guilty to murder.
Nima Momeni, 38, was arraigned on Thursday in a San Francisco courtroom on a single murder charge in Lee’s death last month.
Momeni’s attorney entered the plea on her client’s behalf. The judge ordered Momeni to remain in jail without bail.
San Francisco’s district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, has alleged that Momeni planned to kill Lee and left him at the scene bleeding after the stabbing.
Lee was found by police with multiple stab wounds in downtown San Francisco in the predawn hours of 4 April. He was taken to San Francisco general hospital and died while doctors operated on him. A kitchen knife was recovered from the surrounding area, Jenkins had previously said.
In the days after the killing, pundits and some tech executives had been quick to argue that Lee’s death was an example of violent crime running rampant in the northern California city.
But prosecutors soon revealed that Lee and Momeni had been acquainted with each other. Prosecutors allege the stabbing was the result of a dispute between the two men that centered on Lee’s relationship with Momeni’s sister, Khazar Elyassnia, who has become a key figure in the case that now centers around alleged drug use and romantic intrigue.
Elyassnia, 37, is married to well known Bay Area plastic surgeon Dino Elyassnia. Momeni, her older brother, was the owner of a Bay-Area IT consulting firm called ExpandIT, and has worked as a consultant and system engineer at a number of tech companies over the years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
According to court filings, Momeni had confronted Lee about his relationship with Elyassnia and an incident the day prior to the stabbing, when Lee and Elyassnia had spent time together in an apartment.
Prosecutors say a witness had said that Momeni and Lee went to Lee’s hotel room, where Momeni demanded to know if his younger sister “was doing drugs or anything inappropriate”, which Lee denied.
Security footage shows Momeni and Lee leaving a building together on the night of the stabbing, and getting into Momeni’s BMW around 2am. Prosecutors say that Momeni drove to a dark and secluded spot, where he attacked Lee with a kitchen knife, stabbing him three times, including once in the heart. He then sped away “and left victim to slowly die”, according to court documents.
In a motion filed on Monday, Paula Canny, Momeni’s defense attorney, argued that the narrative put out by San Francisco police is based on hard-to-see video evidence, the San Francisco Standard newspaper reported.
Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom on Thursday, Canny described Lee’s death as a combination self-defense and accident, the Standard reported. She also said Momeni is not a US citizen, and is at risk of being deported to his home country of Iran.
Canny and the San Francisco district’s attorney office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
