According to court documents obtained by NBC News on Friday, Cash App founder Bob Lee was fatally stabbed by an IT consultant close to downtown San Francisco after the two men, who police claim knew each other, got into an altercation over the suspect’s sister.
According to the records, the suspect, 38-year-old Nima Momeni of Emeryville, a suburb of San Francisco, drove Lee to a remote location where he was stabbed three times with a 4-inch kitchen knife, twice in the chest. Lee suffered stab wounds to at least one of his heartbeats.
According to the docs, Momeni’s sister did at one point text Lee. According to the records, she wrote: “Just wanted to make sure your doing ok Cause know nima came way down hard on you.”
She said, “Thank you for being such a gentleman and handling everything with grace. I adore you, selfish jerks.
Momeni was captured on Thursday morning following a nine-day manhunt that garnered global attention and increased focus on Bay Area public safety concerns.
The district attorney for San Francisco informed reporters on Thursday that he would face a murder charge. He will be charged on April 25, according to a representative for the district attorney’s office, and if found guilty, he may spend the rest of his life in prison.
The San Francisco district attorney’s office filed court filings on Friday in an effort to hold the suspect without bond. The records outline the sequence of events that led to the stabbing.
Prosecutors said in the documents that Lee and a companion who was spoken to by police had been hanging out in a hotel room in San Francisco on the evening of April 3. The acquaintance, listed in the documents as Witness 1, observed Lee speaking with Momeni.
The witness overheard Momeni asking Lee if Momeni’s sister had engaged in any inappropriate behavior earlier in the day. According to the records, Lee had to “reassure” Momeni that “nothing untoward had occurred.”
Later that evening, a security camera captured Lee and Momeni leaving his sister’s apartment and entering Momeni’s white BMW. Police have further video that reveals the BMW driving toward a “dark and remote place” close to downtown San Francisco.
Afterwards, the two guys are seen chatting while standing side by side on a sidewalk for a little while. Momeni then appears to stab Lee. Then Momeni threw the knife, hopped back in his car, and took off.
According to the records, when police arrived on the scene at around 2:30 a.m., Lee was motionless, laying in the roadway, and bleeding “uncontrollably.” Officers discovered the blood-stained knife when they went back to search the area.
According to the court documents, “Defendant did not use some form of pocket knife, but a cooking knife from an apartment and kitchen.” “This attack was premeditated and well-planned.”
The idea that the founder of the Cash App was killed in a senseless act of violence has been disproven by the information that Lee and Momeni knew one another.
Elon Musk, a tech billionaire, appeared to attribute the murder on “serial violent criminals” in a tweet that earned him the wrath of the district attorney.
On his LinkedIn profile, Momeni describes himself as an entrepreneur. He declares himself to have graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and to be the proprietor of a tech business called Extend IT Inc.
A representative at U.C. Berkeley, however, claimed to NBC News on Friday that the institution has “no record of graduation or attendance” for a Nima Momeni.
In his last position, Lee oversaw product development for the cryptocurrency firm MobileCoin. Prior to joining Block, he served as the company’s chief technology officer at Square, the financial technology company co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
He later developed the well-known money transfer business Cash App.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Lee also invested in other Internet firms, including the social audio app Clubhouse and Musk’s SpaceX project.