On Tuesday, a jury in San Francisco found IT consultant Nima Momeni guilty of the 2023 stabbing death of tech executive Bob Lee, which was actually the result of a personal argument but raised questions about street crime in the city.
Momeni was found guilty of second-degree murder by the jury, but he was exonerated of first-degree murder.
Deliberations began on December 4 and a verdict was reached on Monday, but it was read out on Tuesday.According to NBC Bay Area, the jury was urged to consider first-degree murder with an addition of employing a deadly weapon.
According to the station, Momeni and his primary lawyer, who attended the hearing via Zoom, seemed emotionless when the verdict was read.
According to San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, he could spend 16 years to life behind bars.
Early on April 4, 2023, Lee, 43, the creator of the well-known money transfer app Cash App, was discovered stabbed close to downtown San Francisco. After being taken to a hospital, he passed away from his wounds.
According to the prosecution, Momeni planned to kill Lee by stabbing him during a dispute about his sister’s drug use, whom Lee knew. Momeni claimed that Lee stabbed him after he defended himself after Lee assaulted him with a knife.
Although it was a lesser charge of second-degree murder, Lee’s brother, Tim Oliver Lee, told reporters that the family is thankful for the guilty judgment.
“What transpired here is known to us. Tim Oliver Lee stated, “We believe he had the intent to murder, but the jury believed he did not have the intent going into that situation.” “But what matters today is that we had a guilty verdict, and that Nima Momeni is going away for a very long time.”
Records showed that a man was shouting, pleading for help, and claiming that someone had stabbed him on the morning of the murder, according to a dispatcher who alerted police.
When Elon Musk of SpaceX wrote on social media following Lee’s passing on violence in San Francisco and asked the district attorney about violent repeat offenders, the case instantly became controversial.
Rather, a week later, San Francisco police revealed that Momeni, 40, whose sister was close with Lee, had been arrested. Momeni is not a repeat offender.
Momeni was charged with taking Lee to a remote location and using a 4-inch kitchen knife to stab him three times. Lee’s heart was stabbed.
Momeni argued with Lee about his sister, according to the prosecution, and he intended to kill Lee.
According to Momeni’s testimony, on April 3, his sister called and requested him to come get her from a friend of Lee’s who lived in an apartment that the sister described as being her drug dealer. The sister stated that after using the drug GHB, she told her brother that she might have experienced sexual assault.
In court filings, prosecutors claimed that a witness saw Momeni asking Lee “about whether his sister was doing drugs or anything inappropriate” the night of the murder, and Lee had to tell him that nothing had happened.
When Lee pulled a knife on him, Momeni said he responded in self-defense.
Momeni informed jurors that Lee had been using narcotics the night before the attack. Momeni said that after Momeni joked that he would like to spend his final night in San Francisco with his family rather than at strip clubs, Lee attacked him. They were in a car together when they pulled over because Momeni felt Lee was about to throw up.
Momeni asserted that he had to protect himself when Lee produced the knife. Lee ultimately walked away down the street after a battle over the weapon, according to Momeni, but Momeni was unaware that Lee had been stabbed.
On October 14, the trial got underway. According to opening statements by Assistant District Attorney Omid Talai, Lee, who was the chief product officer of MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency firm at the time, was “stabbed through his heart and left to die.”
“Of course, we presented evidence that we thought substantiated a first-degree murder conviction, but at the end of the day, the jury has weighed in with their verdict, and we respect what that is, and we do understand, based on the facts, how they might get there,” Jenkins, the DA, responded when asked why the jury chose second-degree murder over first-degree murder.
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