Nima Momeni: ‘A bad joke’ led to Bob Lee attacking him with a knife

Alleged murderer Nima Momeni testified Wednesday about the death of Bob Lee, claiming that a bad joke led the tech executive to attack him with a knife, which he then turned on Lee — all of which was re-enacted in a San Francisco courtroom.

Momeni, who is standing trial for murder, retold his version of the events that occurred in the early morning hours of April 4, 2023, under the Bay Bridge where Lee was stabbed three times. 

“He just blew up. He just went from zero to 100, like that. His face just tensed up, his jaw coming forward…you could see the anger,” said Momeni about the alleged attack. 

On the stand, Momeni — the sole eyewitness to the alleged crime — recast the events leading up to the killing, the cause of Lee’s death, and what followed. He testified that he did not know Lee had died until a day after the news broke. 

But the prosecution, which began its cross-examination Wednesday afternoon, attempted to pick apart the story, claiming it was one of a number of hypotheticals the defense chose to use in order to fit their story with the evidence. 

Prosecutors have argued that Momeni drove Lee to the secluded spot under the Bay Bridge and killed him in an act of revenge, because, they said, Lee allowed his sister to be sexually assaulted. 

Momeni testified that his sister told him she had been assaulted at a party on April 3, but as he investigated the incident, he came to believe she had exaggerated. 

Khazar Momeni was with Lee’s alleged drug dealer Jeremy Boivin when she took the party drug GHB with Boivin and another woman. She testified that she woke up half-dressed on his bed and then called her brother and husband, plastic surgeon Dino Elyassnia, for help. 

After picking her up, Momeni attempted to piece together what happened, he said on the stand. He reached out to Lee, who vouched for Boivin.

Defense attorneys showed the jury text messages between Lee and Momeni on April 3, after Nima called Lee to learn more about Boivin. “Thank u again for talking to me, good timing,” Nina texted, with a prayer hands emoji and a-okay emoji. That message was liked by Lee. 

Momeni testified that this minutes-long phone conversation with Lee about Boivin’s character put his mind at ease. Later that night, when Boivin came to Khazar’s apartment to pick up some items, Momeni said of Boivin that “he was super polite and apologetic about everything that had happened. It didn’t seem that he would be that type.” 

“It sounded like something my sister said, being emotional, trying to get attention,” Momeni said about her initial claim that Boivin had assaulted her. 

Momeni testified that Lee came to Khazar’s apartment late on the night of April 3. At some point, Khazar asked the two to leave, and they went out looking for some place to go and party. 

Momeni said he drove around as they tried to figure out their next step, but when Lee spilled a drink they pulled over under the bridge. Momeni looked for something to help Lee clean up the mess and found a cloth — as well as the nitrous oxide his sister had left in the car. 

“He took a bunch of the whip-it stuff,” said Momeni. “He was being silly, chatting, made a bunch of weird noises. I thought he was gonna puke or something so I followed him out.” 

Lee didn’t vomit, said Momeni, but said he wanted more drugs and suggested going back to his hotel. Momeni testified that by then he had changed his mind about continued partying with Lee.

“To get out of it, I said what you could call a bad joke,” Momeni said on the stand. “I’d rather go hang out with my family rather than strip clubs,” he said he told Lee.

That, said Momeni, is when Lee completely changed. 

“It was so fast I can’t remember…he pushed my chest,” said Momeni. “There was a — he reached in his jacket pocket for something and pulled his hand out. It was an object, it looked like he had a knife, a blade or something…I just wanted to control the hands and I was afraid for my life and I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

Momeni and his attorney re-enacted the incident in court: Momeni grabbing his attorney’s arm as he swung it sideways at him. Momeni then pushed the arm back towards his attorney.

Momeni said he feared for his life and just wanted to get Lee away from him. He also said he had no idea Lee had been fatally stabbed. 

He said Lee just walked away, tapping on his phone. 

Immediately afterward, said Momeni, he picked up the knife and threw it over a fence. “I didn’t think about it, I just threw it over the fence,” he said. “I was in shock. I was just attacked.”  

Momeni also explained why he acted as he did in the hours and days following Lee’s death, which he said he didn’t find out about until April 5. 

“I was just trying to process the whole thing,” he said on the stand. “I called my sister and told her: ‘Bob went crazy, don’t let him back in…He tried to attack me.’”

Momeni said he thought a series of texts from Khazar, which the prosecution has argued were about Lee’s death, were actually a reaction to Lee attacking him. He also said that when she is emotional it is common for her to exaggerate and even threaten him, like when she called Momeni a “psycho” in a text. 

Momeni expressed regret for Lee’s death, noting that if he could go back in time he would have stayed out all night with Lee, or at least called him a rideshare. 

“I would have just sent him home in an Uber or just stayed out and partied with him all night,” he said. “I feel awful to his family, to himself. He didn’t deserve that.” 

The prosecution’s at-times combative cross-examination centered on the state’s attempts to undercut Momeni’s story. 

“He wanted to kill you over a dumb joke?” asked Deputy District Attorney Omid Talai, who then pressed Momeni on how a joke could cause Lee to attack him. 

When Momeni said Lee took the joke personally, Talai shot back: “He took it to the heart!” 

During Talai’s afternoon of cross-examination, he went through Momeni’s version of events step by step to understand why he took certain actions after Lee’s death, including parking his car at his mother’s house the morning after the killing. 

At one point, Talai suggested that Momeni and his team crafted the entire narrative to fit the evidence.

Outside of court, Lee’s brother Timothy told a waiting group of reporters that Momeni’s testimony was unbelievable. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. It actually shows there is no doubt to what happened,” he said.

Momeni’s testimony will continue Thursday morning.