A tech consultant was convicted on Tuesday of second-degree murder in the death of Bob Lee, the wealthy founder of Cash App who was killed last year in a slaying that inflamed tensions over the safety of San Francisco streets after the pandemic.
The consultant, Nima Momeni, 40, avoided first-degree murder charges but faces a sentence of 15 years to life in prison for the killing.
In the early morning hours of April 4, 2023, the police found Mr. Lee bleeding profusely in a doorway on an otherwise empty street in downtown San Francisco, not far from Oracle Park, where the Giants play baseball. He had been stabbed in the hip and heart, and he had called 911 begging for help. He died soon after at a nearby hospital.
Mr. Lee, 43, was a well-known tech executive in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. He had been a founder of the digital wallet service Cash App in 2013, and at the time of his death, he was the chief product officer of the cryptocurrency start-up MobileCoin.
He had recently moved to Miami but was back in San Francisco for a visit and was partying that night in a condo in the Millennium Tower, a skyscraper known for its wealthy residents and worrisome tilt.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers have agreed on little — except that Mr. Lee had been partying with Khazar Momeni, who was either his friend or romantic partner, and her brother, Nima Momeni, a tech consultant who lived in Emeryville, across the bay from San Francisco.
In San Francisco Superior Court, prosecutors argued that Mr. Momeni killed Mr. Lee with a paring knife on a street near the tower in a fit of anger, after learning that Mr. Lee had introduced his sister to dealers who drugged and abused her.
Mr. Momeni’s lawyers disputed that claim and said that he was instead acting in self-defense after Mr. Lee had lunged at him with the knife over what Mr. Momeni called “a bad joke” during the trial, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
Mr. Momeni said during the trial that he did not know Mr. Lee had been injured and that they parted ways. Mr. Momeni was arrested nine days after the killing and has remained in a local jail since then. He pleaded not guilty.
Autopsy reports showed that Mr. Lee was under the influence of cocaine, alcohol and ketamine when he died, and defense lawyers argued that Mr. Lee’s prolific drug use made him aggressive.
Prosecutors said that only Mr. Momeni’s DNA was found on the handle of the knife, according to local news reports, and that Mr. Momeni did not call 911, which they said made the self-defense claim dubious.
The initial news that a prominent tech executive had bled out on a San Francisco sidewalk sparked a furious response from some Silicon Valley tech leaders and influencers, who quickly concluded that the killing was a perfect illustration of how San Francisco had failed to control homelessness, untreated mental illness and street crime.
Elon Musk posted on X after the killing that “violent crime in SF is horrific,” despite the city having a relatively low violent crime rate based on population. Jason Calacanis, a tech investor, posted on X that the city was run by “incompetent lunatics” and was sinking into “utter chaos.”
After Mr. Momeni’s arrest and the determination by police investigators that the slaying had stemmed from a personal dispute, other tech executives criticized those earlier theories.
“I suspect we’ll find that this story doesn’t represent anything universal about the great city of San Francisco,” posted Jeff Lawson, a co-founder of the tech communications company Twilio, whose offices are near where Mr. Lee was killed. “Rather, it is a tragic aberration, the result of an interpersonal conflict — the kind that can happen in any city and time.”
The six-week trial shed light on the drug-fueled party scene involving the city’s wealthy and elite residents. Defense lawyers claimed that Mr. Lee was on a cocaine binge when he died, and they showed jurors during closing arguments a video of Mr. Lee snorting cocaine hours before his death.
The video was recorded by surveillance cameras at the Battery, a San Francisco social club, and defense attorneys said that the footage showed Mr. Lee had consumed drugs using the same knife that later killed him.
Mr. Lee’s family called those arguments dirty tricks and said that the slender metal object he was holding in the video was a collar stay — a small accessory to keep dress shirt collars crisp, and his preferred implement for snorting cocaine.
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