Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee — tech exec’s alleged killer additionally labored in tech

Mission Local is informed that San Francisco police earlier today made an arrest in connection with the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee after an operation was conducted outside of city limits. The alleged killer also works in engineering and is a man Lee allegedly knew.

We are told that police were dispatched to Emeryville today with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and address in Emeryville. SFPD officials traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.

Multiple police sources have not described the pre-dawn stabbing last week that killed 43-year-old Lee in a deserted section of downtown San Francisco as neither an attempted robbery nor a random attack.

Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as familiar with each other. In the early hours of April 4, they were allegedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.

Allegedly, some sort of confrontation began while both men were in the vehicle and possibly continued after Lee exited the car. Police allege Momeni stabbed Lee multiple times with a knife, which was recovered not far from where officers originally responded on the 300 block of Main Street.

This scenario would partially explain why at 2:30 a.m. Lee was walking through a portion of Main Street where there is little to no foot traffic. That was one of several incongruous circumstances surrounding Lee’s violent death, which law enforcement officials said from the start felt it was anything but a simple or random crime.

Still, some of Lee’s tech industry peers and a chorus of other influential voices portrayed this murder as part of a city engulfed in violent crime and descending into further chaos. While Lee is one of a dozen murder victims in San Francisco this year, his murder is the only one that has received national — or, in most cases, only superficial local coverage.

The other San Francisco murder victims of 2023 are Gavin Boston, 40; Irving Sanchez Morales, 28; Carlos Romero Flores, 29; Maxwell Maltzman, 18; Demario Lockett, 44; Maxwell Mason, 29; Humberto Avila, 46; Gregory McFarland Jr., 36; Kareem Sims, 43; Debra Lynn Hord, 57; and Jermaine Reeves, 52.

In San Francisco there is much visible public misery, troubling street behavior and blatant drug use. Property crime rates have long been high and police detection rates for property crimes have long been minimal. However, the city’s violent crime rate is at near historic lows and lower than most medium-to-large cities.

Homicides per 100,000 population

In recent years,

The number of murders increased in San

Francisco – but they stay

low compared to

historical trends

Homicides per 100,000 population

In recent years,

The number of murders increased in San

Francisco – but they stay

low compared to historical trends

Diagram by Will Jarrett. Data from the California Department of Justice and the Census Bureau.

Today’s arrest appears to disprove the notion that San Francisco’s streets caused Lee’s violent death. If the police have their man, what was involved was neither a robbery nor a gratuitous assault by a random assailant, but an alleged argument between men who knew each other, which the suspect allegedly escalated into a deadly conflict.

However, Lee’s death was summed up in the media and on social media as a highlight of recent San Francisco misfortunes and crimes: large groups of young people feuding in Stonestown; the abrupt closure of mid-tier Whole Foods, leaving San Franciscans with just eight other Whole Foods within city limits; the severe caning of former fire commissioner Don Carmignani in the Marina District, allegedly by belligerent homeless people – all of which creates a sense of a city dying.

However, this type of reporting does not capture the actual life experience of the vast majority of San Franciscans. Also, potentially extenuating details of each event are omitted. Carmignani, for example, was brutally hit in the head with a metal bar and hospitalized. But the lawyer for his alleged attacker claims the former fire commissioner initially pepper-sprayed the homeless man accused of hitting him – which would certainly falsify this incident.

Notably, police sources report that prior to this incident, a number of homeless people in the Marina District had been pepper sprayed.

The Lee arrest is a groundbreaking story. We will update or track this item asap.

To update:

Records from San Francisco show that Nima Momeni was taken to jail at 9:19 a.m