SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — The trial of Nima Momeni, a tech worker accused of fatally stabbing Cash App founder Bob Lee, entered its third week in San Francisco Superior Court Wednesday with the prosecution showing the jury a video compilation that they say included images of Momeni’s fatal stabbing attack on Lee under the Bay Bridge last April.
Milad Rashidian, a San Francisco police officer, said he put together a compilation of videos captured by public cameras of the moments before and after Lee’s stabbing.
Elevator camera footage shows Lee, dressed in all black, and Momeni, wearing all white, leaving Momeni’s sister Khazar Momeni’s apartment at the Millennium Tower around 2 a.m. on April 4, 2023.
The compilation showed the pair got into a white BMW before driving to a location under the Bay Bridge on the 400 block of Main Street, where they sat for roughly 15 minutes before getting out of the car.
Grainy footage from a Google Nest camera on the ninth floor of an apartment overlooking the scene captured what happened next. There are two figures, one in white, the other in black.
Rashidian said they were in the street for about five minutes. The figure in white is in the street, while the figure in black is near a Caltrans fence. The figure in white then quickly advanced on the figure in black, according to Rashidian, though the footage was low resolution.
Afterwards, “The subject in white appears to walk towards the fence and lean into it,” Rashidian said.
The fence in question is where a knife with Lee’s blood on the blade and Momeni’s DNA on the handle was found by police. Prosecutors say Momeni threw the knife over the fence.
The footage then shifted to street cameras capturing the aftermath with Lee, injured, running up Main Street. He signaled for a passing car, but it did not stop and help him. The footage then ended.
“Mr. Lee appears to collapse,” Rashidian said at the end of the footage. Rashidian said that police were never able to track down the motorist who did not stop for Lee.
Simultaneous footage showed the white BMW speeding out of San Francisco, over the Bay Bridge, eventually stopping at Momeni’s residence in the East Bay.
“The BMW appears to be driving faster” than in the footage when Lee and Momeni left Millennium Tower, Rashidian testified.
Much of the other footage was benign — Lee at bars with a friend, Lee in hotel lobbies.
Assistant District Attorney Omid Talai asked Rashidian if Lee appeared to be intoxicated in any of those videos, and Rashidian answered that he deals with intoxicated people in the course of doing his job “almost daily,” and that Lee appeared to be behaving normally.
The defense has argued that Lee was on a drug bender in the days before he was killed, and that it was Lee who attacked Momeni, who turned the knife on Lee in self defense.
On cross examination, defense attorney Bradford Cohen pressed Rashidian’s point about Lee’s sobriety, pointing out that people under the influence can also suffer mood swings and other symptoms not noticeable on camera, and that a habitual drug user such as Lee might not be as outwardly impaired as someone using for the first time.
Cohen asked Rashidian if he knew how much alcohol Lee had drank that day and the days before the murder, and if he knew what drugs or how much drugs he had taken.
“I don’t know how much [drugs or alcohol] anyone involved had,” Rashidian answered.
Cohen then asked if he saw the black clad figure in the footage of the attack circling the white clad figure; at opening statements, Momeni’s defense said that Lee circled Momeni just before the attack.
“I don’t recall them specifically circling but I do recall them moving around,” Rashidian replied.
Prosecutors have said that Momeni killed Lee because Lee was doing drugs with his sister, Khazar and had introduced her to a drug dealer, Jeremy Boivin, who Khazar testified sexually assaulted her.
Last week, Khazar Momeni testified in defense of her brother. She said that Lee was behaving aggressively in the hours before his death and that her brother was not angry with Lee before the murders. She said she never mentioned Lee’s name in relation to the sexual assault.
Testimony will continue Thursday morning.