For two days last week, accused murderer Nima Momeni took the stand and told the jury a story the public has waited 19 months to hear: his version of what happened in his BMW under the Bay Bridge on the night of April 3, 2023.
Momeni — the only eyewitness to the last moments of Bob Lee’s life — told a simple enough story. He said he didn’t attack the tech executive and stab him to death, as he’s been accused of. Lee attacked him.
“I was afraid for my life and I didn’t know what he was going to do,” he testified of the critical moments — the ones in which, he claimed, Lee drew a kitchen knife out of his jacket pocket and Momeni fought him off, leaving Lee fatally wounded.
I didn’t stab him; he tried to stab me. It’s an obvious defense, and, in Momeni’s telling, a strange one. For one thing, Lee was stabbed not once but three times, a fact Momeni — who said he didn’t realize the tech executive had been wounded in the skirmish — didn’t even try to explain.
Then there’s his behavior after the incident — stashing his evidence-filled car at this mother’s house, neglecting to tell his sister what had happened, lawyering up when he learned of Lee’s death rather than going to the police. It all raises abundant questions, and prosecutors tried to play up the absurdity of Momeni’s tale and trip him up on his recitation of details.
But for all that, it was surprisingly convincing, or at least satisfying in a way the prosecution’s own explanation of what went down never quite achieved. Momeni was able to supply answers, however curious, where prosecutors could only offer conjecture. And in a contest of two stories, neither of which quite adds up, that may be enough for a jury.
For nearly two years, the figure of Momeni has hovered on the outskirts of his own long-awaited trial, painted in press accounts and in the trial’s opening days as a protective brother, a partier, a weapon enthusiast. When his time finally came to testify, he came across as both more human and more calculating than expected.
Momeni took the stand last Wednesday in a navy blue suit, visibly nervous but ready for his attorney’s questions. His delicate Farsi accent contrasted with his hulking figure,
His mother sat in the front row of the courtroom, listening intently. The family of his alleged victim sat across the aisle, getting their first chance to hear the man they believe killed Lee speak.
The first pillar of the DA’s case Momeni made wobble was that he was motivated to kill Lee in revenge for an alleged sexual assault on his sister. He said that by 9 p.m. the night before the killing, he had talked to everyone involved and came to the conclusion that his sister had not been assaulted.
In place of his supposed motivation for killing Lee, Momeni supplied a motive for Lee to have attacked him. Momeni claimed that Lee attacked him after he told “a bad joke” — saying Lee should be at home with his family instead of out at strip clubs. As a provocation for a knife attack, it seems bizarrely slender. Then again, Lee was coming off a multi-day multi-drug bender, and if Momeni is to be believed, showed up packing a knife, so perhaps it wouldn’t have taken much.
There were other gaps and curiosities — including Momeni’s claim that he tossed the knife over a fence in a panic — but fragmentary recall of a chaotic late-night event is hardly unusual.
Momeni did offer an explanation — your mileage may vary on just how convincing — for several outstanding questions. He said he believed texts from his sister in which she suspected that something violent had happened were about Lee attacking him, not the reverse. He said he left his car at his mother’s due to a broken window, not to hide evidence it contained.
He said he didn’t even know Lee was injured, or had been stabbed, until he found out he’d died a day later, and never even speculated or worried that his fight led to Lee’s death.
In the end, he did what the prosecution struggled to do: told a story about what exactly happened that early morning in April 2023. That story, while attacked by the prosecution as an invented fiction to fit the facts, may very well be the narrative on which the trial rests.