Did Bob Lee snort coke with a paring knife or a collar stay? Nima Momeni’s fate may hinge on this question after defense attorneys showed a video of the CashApp founder holding what they argued was the weapon that, hours later, was used to kill him.
The defense’s decision to show the jury this footage for the first time during closing arguments Tuesday was intended to bolster the claim that Lee, who was killed April 4, 2023, had a knife on him prior to the altercation with Momeni. The defense argues that Lee, in a drug-fueled rage, used it to attack Momeni, who had made an offensive joke about Lee’s relationship with his family.
As the jury deliberates, The Standard is unpacking key questions surrounding this last-minute piece of evidence.
What did the video show?
The video shows Lee and friend Bo Mahzammbi outside the Battery at 10 p.m. on April 3, 2023, the night before the murder. In the footage, Mahzammbi’s back is to the camera and Lee is facing it.
According to Zangeneh, the video shows Mahzammbi snorting cocaine before Lee takes “one bump, then another.”
After he lifts his head, Lee is seen holding in his fist the item he ostensibly had just used to take drugs. The object points vertically from his hand and is light enough in color to be picked up by the camera in the dark.
“This is the knife,” Zangeneh told jurors, referring to the Joseph Joseph knife used to kill Lee. “Take your time, look at dimensions and size.”
But Lee’s ex-wife Krista Lee later told reporters that what he was holding was a collar stay, not a knife. She said Lee often carried collar stays, which he used to do drugs.
So what was it? A paring knife with a 3.5-inch blade or a 2-inch collar stay? The video’s grainy quality makes it difficult to say. When The Standard asked Momeni’s attorneys to provide the video for review, they declined.
“I don’t know if I can because it’s in evidence,” Zangeneh said. “I don’t know what the rules are here, and I don’t want to send the media evidence without knowing what the rules are.”
Did prosecutors make a mistake by not showing the video?
Though the video’s 11th-hour introduction was a shock to the courtroom, the evidence was no surprise to prosecutors. They received the footage from the San Francisco Police Department during their investigation and agreed to include it as trial evidence, according to Zangeneh. He believes prosecutors shirked their responsibility by not presenting the video to the jury, in hopes of keeping it under wraps.
“If there is bad evidence, and I’m a prosecutor, I’m gonna show it to you, because that is my responsibility, right?” Zangeneh said.
The prosecution declined to comment on the video, noting that the jury was deliberating.
Hadar Aviram, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, said the prosecution’s decision to withhold the video is understandable. On one hand, if the prosecution team had introduced it themselves, they would have had the opportunity to explain to the jury what they believed Lee was holding. But mentioning the video at all would risk losing control of the narrative and unintentionally blowing up its importance.
After discovering the video among thousands of hours of surveillance footage, the defense assumed the prosecution would bring it up when Mahzammbi was on the stand, Zangeneh said.
When the prosecution didn’t, Zangeneh’s team decided they wouldn’t either. Zangeneh called Mahzammbi an aggressive witness who refused to answer questions truthfully and said discussing the video with him would have been useless. Instead, the defense chose to bring in the evidence during closing arguments for maximum impact.
“It’s strategy,” Zangeneh said. “You ever play chess?”
Aviram said she wouldn’t call the move unethical but speculated that the jury might see its last-minute introduction as questionable.
“If I were a juror, I would think, ‘This is kind of dodgy,’” she said. “It’s technically lawful, but it’s coming out of left field.”
To find Momeni guilty, the jury has to decide whether the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt that he murdered Lee.
The defense has tried to introduce doubt through the self-defense narrative, which is strengthened by the idea that Lee was in possession of the murder weapon in the hours leading up to the stabbing.
Whether the jurors will buy it remains to be seen.
“People are smart,” Aviram said. “They don’t think only about what they see; they also think about what they do not see. They might see [the video] as a whole lot of nothing or that, yes, this is bolstering the self-defense story.”