Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Previously on Foundry Tuesday, San.
Francisco, the tech executive is dead.
He was stabbed in San Francisco south of Market Street.
Yeah, the latest reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of cash App. I would bet dollars to dimes that the story is very similar to a case we had in La recently where a young woman was basically stabbed for no reason by a psychotic homeless person.
I hope your mom gets stabbed and let's see if you say we should wait and see.
Our homicide investigators develop information that identified the suspect as thirty eight.
Year old Nima Momenti.
We can confirm that mister Lee and miss Momenti knew each other.
It was the morning of April thirteenth, nine days since the killing of Bob Lee. It was early, about four or five am, still dark out. That's when Chris, who asked us not to use his last name, heard a commotion outside his window.
I was awakened to a megaphone just outside demanding that someone come out of the building.
Chris lives in a big warehouse style loft in Emeryville. It's about a fifteen minute drive across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco when there's no traffic, and really the only time when there'd be no traffic on the Bay Bridge would be the middle of the night or very early in the morning.
Do you remember looking out.
The window and seeing a lot of police, A shocking number of cops or this area.
At least a.
Number of them had helmets on, they had large rifles, and they were wearing body armor.
He remembers seeing about twenty cops. There may have been more.
It was just like you've seen the movie come out with your hands up.
I didn't know exactly what was going on.
The best I could figure is that there'd been a lot.
Of catalogic converter effects. Thought maybe the police had acquired somebody in the building. But I mean, that was the best I could come up with.
I never, in my wildest dreams thought that, you know, they were after a resident of the building.
They served a search and arrest warrant at his apartment at a very early time of their choosing.
This is my anonymous source in the police department. Because we're protecting his identity, we're having a voice actor read what he told me.
So from what I know.
Once the SWAT team began calling out to him, he came out very fast and surrendered very immediately, just dressed as if he was either.
Sleeping in his clothing.
Or was just expecting this to happen.
Because of my advantage point, I really couldn't see who it was.
Chris again, the building resident.
I could sort of guess that it was a male based on his build, but I had no idea who it was.
Curious and not sure what to do, he turned where any of us might go looking for answers.
So I got on the Facebook group for the building and I started to piece together from what everyone was saying exactly what was happening. I learned that it was Nima that they did in fact arrest, and then both through that Facebook group and through the morning.
News, I learned that he was being accused of murdering Bob Lee.
And that was you know, that was pretty shocking to hear.
The man arrested that day was named Nima Momenti. He was thirty eight years old, he ran a small IT company, and most surprisingly, police said he knew Bob Lee. Did the officers find anything interesting in his apartment?
We've heard that his apartment was kind of weird.
Apparently he liked knives and had some kind of weird mall ninja knives.
What's mall ninja?
Remember in Mall's they had all those weird shops that sold the curvy swords and the dragon things and all the crystals and all that stuff. That's kind of like mall ninja stuff, right, the knives that have points and blades all over them that clearly are for looks and would never be actually functional, things like that.
By morning, the news had broken and the media were clamoring for any information they could get on the suspected killer of Bob Lee.
Against phone call. This frantic phone call from Mike Duel from KCBS radio. He's a reporter there.
Sam Singer occupies another unit in the same building. He wasn't home at the time, but a few hours after the police arrived, he got a call from a.
Journalist and he's just Sam, Sam, the murderers in your building, and I'm driving work here and I said, what are we talking about here? And he goes, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He says, this is brand new. Bob Ly's murderer has been arrested and he's in your building.
Sometimes San Francisco feels like a very small town. Singer is friendly with many journalists. He's a well known public relations guy in the Bay Area. He specializes in crisis communications. He represented Chevron when they're oil refinery in Richmond, California, caught on fire, reportedly sending fifteen thousand people to the hospital. He represented the San Francisco Zoo when the tiger jumped
out of its enclosure and killed a teenager. And now by chance, he had a role to play in San Francisco's next big story.
And I said, okay, I said, just out of interest, what's his unit number? And he goes two toh one. I said, Mike, He's not just in my building, he's my next door neighbor. So Mike de wall in case, bsay, can we just come over right now? Can we want to interview you? Did you know him?
We are executive Sam Singer never expected he would be next door neighbors with the man accused in the criminal matter.
Total shock. I'm in the public relations of business. We don't normally wind up working next to killers.
Remember what I said about San Francisco feeling like a very small town. Singer also happens to represent one of tech's most outspoken figures on crime in San Francisco.
One of our other clients is Gary Tan of y Combinator, who immediately texted me when he saw that Nima was my next door neighbor and said, you live next to Bob Lee's accused killer.
This is what it felt like in the days, weeks, and even months after Nima Momeni's arrest. Did you hear? Who is this guy? Do you know him? Where did he come from? Police said that Nima Momeni knew Bob Lee, but most of Bob's friends and family had never heard of him before. They were dumbfounded. I've been trying to answer these very basic questions, who is Nima Momente and why did he do it? What turned up was not the story I expected, but a larger human drama spanning
continents about drugs and partying, machismo, love and violence. I'm sean Wen. This is foundering the killing of Bob Ley. Do you remember where you were?
Like?
What my wife called me? Oh? Have you checked? The news?
Said?
No, Nima was in trouble.
That's how I.
Found out Alex Porshae again lives in the Bay Area, where he's part of a relatively large Iranian immigrant community. His wife used to run a small grocery store where Nima worked as a teenager.
I was in this belief Nima was just as close as an adopted's son to my wife. The kids grow to like him.
Through his attorneys, Nima Momeni turned down my request for an interview and also declined to make a statement. Like Alex Nina's family immigrated to the US from Iran.
He was a likable kid.
To understand anything about Nima killing Bob, the violent act at the center of this story, it's important to understand the role of violence in his coming to America in the first place. According to court documents, Nima Momeni, his mom, and his younger sister arrived in the US in nineteen ninety nine. Nima was about fifteen, his sister was a year younger. An anonymous source told me that in Iran, the Momentis were very rich. Their dad was and still is a dental surgeon in Tehran. He also has a
business doing chemical imports and exports. I reached out to him via his professional INSTADT grand Page, but have not heard back the Momentius in Iran did not have a happy life. According to court records, Nima's mom, Manas, said she suffered domestic violence and abuse from her husband, and Nima's sister, Kazar, has also alleged sexual abuse from her dad. So Nima, his mom, and his sister left behind their comfortable life in Iran to come to the Bay Area.
They settled in Albany, a city just outside Berkeley. For their first few months here, the three of them shared a single bedroom in the home of one of Mana's childhood friends. Nima and Kazar enrolled in high school as poor kids with foreign accents. Although Nima was a year older, they were placed in the same grade level.
As they were growing up, they had a very very close relationship as they had no choice as a brother and sister. If us Are ever asked him for help, I'm pretty sure he was there, one hundred and fifty percent. I'm very sure of it.
All three banded together to make ends meet. They worked for Alex Porshagen's wife. Nima worked at her grocery store, Manas worked at her catering business as well as a flower shop. Kazar would sometimes babysit for the couple's young children. After some time, they managed to move out of their friend's bedroom and into their own apartment.
They were economically a disadvantage. Mana's worked very hard to keep this family afloat. She did not have a husband. She was not taking government assistance. She's a very proud woman.
Alex said that as far as he knew, Nima was a good kid. He worked hard, he was polite, but Alex could also sense an impatience in Nima.
Hey, remember when Nima I was working for my wife. At one point he was complaining that he didn't have privacy because they lived in such a small resident I think they had a one bedroom. Maybe the mother and a daughter had taken the bedroom and he had to live in the corner of the living room. And I told him, I said, you're not the only one. They all went through these hardships, so get used to it and learned only to make your life better.
The only thing I really knew about him was that he sold lead and I would buy weed off of him.
This is Thomas. He grew up in Albany and went to high school with Nima. He asks me not to use his last name, because some of the things he described were illegal.
The main things is stead out were his clothing style, which I remember he wore like those big like chinko jeans, and you know, and he always dressed in like darker black clothes.
And how did you know he so? Like how did you learn that?
Friends just told me he was always kind of soft spoken, quiet kind of guy, not like playful or joke around or anything. He was just more like, here's the money, here's the weed.
Enjoy How how was it do you remember?
Oh?
The week was good?
Yeah, he had good weed. Yeah, definitely.
Thomas and Nima weren't exactly close, but he had a story for me that seems relevant to what would happen. Later one afternoon in January of two thousand and five, Thomas's friends came by.
They were all like juiced up, like like you know, we just tried to rob Yeman, like and then you pull out a knife and cut us.
Thomas would be the first to admit that the details of this story are fuzzy, but he remembers the broad strokes. And I found a police report which confirms that there was a fight that involved weed and that Nima used a knife on the other two kids.
So my recollection of that is that they went to meet Nema to buy weed off of him, and they tried to just steal the weed. I think one of my friends might have punched him, and then like Nima pulled out a knife, and I the details are a little fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure one of my friends, the one who I think actually hit him, got like sliced on his side right here, and it wasn't a
deep cut. It was more of a surface wound. And I feel like my other friend turned to like maybe get away and got sliced on like backside.
That Nima would be carrying a knife didn't surprise Thomas.
Most of us carried a pocket knife with us, just just because you never know, for whatever reason andy to have it. I almost always had a pocket knife on me, but you know, never pulled it out on anybody.
Did it change how you all saw Nima. Were they hurt by the cuts at all?
I don't think they were hurt by the cuts. I think we just basically were like, oh, well, if you try to rob me, he might stab you. I mean, that's basically what we deducted from that situation.
Very yeah.
It was basically like, okay, well, they can't buy weed off of him anymore. They can't go with me to go buy weed off of him anymore.
Prosecutors say video footage shows Lee and Momini leaving the Millennium Tower during the early morning hours of April fourth and getting into Momini's car. Court documents say defendant not only drove victim to a secluded area, but also brought a kitchen knife with him.
In the motion to detain Nima without bail, prosecutors alleged that he drove Bob to what they called a secluded area in the opposite direction of his hotel. There, Nima stapped Bob three times with a kitchen knife. One of those stabs pierced Bob's heart.
This was a planned and deliberate attack.
They're saying. He took a kitchen knife from his sister's apartment to his car with this, you know, with Bob got in the car, went somewhere else, and then attacked him.
David is one of Nima's closest adult friends. He also asked to withhold his last name. He said he couldn't reconcile the prosecutor's case with the Nima he knew, but not for the reasons you might think.
He wouldn't have a kitchen knife in his car. He would have something like a bowie knife in his car, you know, for just in case.
As a kid, Nima may have carried a knife for self defense, but as an adult he developed a fondness for them more generally.
Because I mean that he likes that stuff. He likes, like fantasy shaped blades with like you know, kers, or maybe cutouts in it, or some decorative handle, you know, elements. He enjoyed that stuff. He would like display them in his you know, in his living space.
David met Nima at work and they became good friends. He painted the picture of Nima as someone who had an interest in weapons, including guns.
He did get into shotgunning and other stuff with me.
But what struck me talking to David was how much Nima sounded like a normal guy. He liked boats.
He had this little sailboat with an outboard motor.
He liked going out.
Yeah, he definitely liked to go to struggles. I mean it was his idea to go like, oh, you guys, come with me, let's go.
He liked burning Man one year David was retrofitting a car for the festival, a hand me down Saturn made to look like a bearded dragon, and then.
He fully jumped in and helped me build the car, you know, dedicated a bunch of his time to it, and then drove with me out to the Plaia. And so that was his first burn in twenty ten.
Can you speak to his relationship with drugs.
He likes them.
This was something I heard from other people too, that Nima was a heavy cocaine user and it impacted his work.
The reason he stopped providing IT services for that first company where I met him was because there was a day where there was a problem in the morning and he couldn't be reached, you know, because I think he'd been up at night and then he was sleeping, and then you know, the fact that he was not on call during business hours was a problem.
Losing your job because of drug use is usually considered a sign of a serious problem. Nima did, however, figure things out. He started his own IT business. I do want to distinguish Nima's job from Bob's job for a second. Early news reports first identified Nima as a tech executive.
Suspect is another tech executive who knew.
As if he was in the same milieu as Bob. That wasn't really true. He ran a small IT firm. Sometimes he had employees, sometimes it was just him. He helped set up servers for small businesses. He wasn't an engineer or a programmer or designer. He wasn't a rocket scientist. He was the guy who gets the Wi Fi working for rocket scientists. He worked in tech, but it's really not the same thing. One thing that is without question is that all three of the momentis Nima, his mom,
and his sister came up in the world. His mom became a dental hygienist. Nima's small business seemed to be doing okay, but just okay. His sister, Kazar, became the most wealthy by marrying a renowned plastic surgeon.
I do remember that he had a sister.
That's Thomas again, who went to high school with.
Nimaad And I don't even really know why I felt this way, that I felt like he was very protective of his sister.
I met her originally, when you know, Nima invited her to my birthday party years ago.
Here's Nina's friend David.
After that, I would refer to her, you know, as Nima's hot sister, right like I was happy to have a pretty girl at my party. She was fun, cool, whatever, Nima's hot sister.
David was shocked when he heard about Nima being arrested. He had always been a good friend and good to David's son. They all went voting together. But after getting over the shock, he had one thought.
If Nima did this or is actually involved in this, it probably has something to do with because our Wow, that's the only way you can really make his blood.
Boil like that.
Rooted in childhood and their father's alleged abuse. When this protective sibling bond was carried into adulthood, it would have lasting consequences. That's after the break Kazar MOMENTI is about a year younger than her brother Nima. As of this recording, she's still married to a prominent plastic surgeon and lives in a Millennium Tower, the tallest residential building in San Francisco. It's a ritzy place. Past residents include professional athletes Joe
Montana and Kevin Durant. It's also famously crooked, like literally it's tilted to one side and sinking an expensive architectural disaster. Kazar has a reputation as a party girl. She's glamorous. She was a fixture at The Battery, a private social club in San Francisco. She was also friends with Bob Lee, who called her Tina, a name she went by among non Iranians. Whenever I talk to anyone about Nima, old friends, former colleagues, acquaintances, the conversation always led back to Kazar.
She was and is central to his life.
They both will jump into the other's fight. So, like, what I've seen is if Nima's arguing with somebody and she's there, she'll get in the middle and get in the face of the other person.
And what has he been like, Like, how does he express his anger?
He'll raise his voice, he'll you know, he'll puff his chest and get loud and curse. And I've seen that.
What does that say about Nima and his relationship with his sister.
Well, it's very it's very close and you know, very connected and well, I would say codependent. I think it's sort of like they've been in the trenches together with their childhood and stuff like that.
Text messages between Nima and Kazar paint the clearest picture of their relationship. I obtained several months of texts dating back to before Bob's death. Most of them are rather sweet and mundane. Kazar since Nima photos of her hair after she had their mom come over and color it. Nima responds, when you want it done right, get mom to do it, or do it yourself. They recommended movies to each other. They asked what each other was having for dinner. They made fun of mutual friends. They made
plans together on a whim. They argued over whose house to hang out at. In one of the text messages that made me laugh, Nima was complaining about the ultra exclusive clubs that Kazar liked to hang out at. He wrote, battery and Millennium shit getting old. Maybe just me, but I'm never comfortable around people in either of those places. So pretentious and douchey. But the texts occasionally reveal more complicated aspects of their lives. We've asked voice actors to
read them, and just a quick note. Like anyone's texts, Nima's and Khazars are filled with typos, so the actors are reading a cleaned up version of the messages.
What time are you going to moms today?
No, I have to meet a friend to pick up something.
In one set of messages from March of twenty twenty three, Kazar seemed to confess that she was cheating on her husband Dino.
I left my ring with a friend and grabbing lunch with him.
Okay, are you fucking serious? You took off your ring and left it at his fucking place and now doing lunch with him today? Did you tell anyone else? Does Mom and Dino know?
Wow? So happy I shared this with you. I made a mistake.
Pretty fucked up, Haz.
During Nima's eventual murder trial, Kazar's extramarital relationships would come up frequently, and it was explained to us that she and Dino were in an open marriage. In another exchange, Kazar appeared to accuse Nima of stealing her cocaine.
Did you take the rock that was left at my house? I had got that to last me for a month. I can't keep paying for blow and give it to people.
Throughout the texts, the siblings were often arguing about cocaine and accusing each other of taking too many drugs, But the most telling exchange I read from the months before Bob's death actually had to do with Kazar and Nima's father. About six weeks before Nima killed Bob, text messages showed that he had a plan to confront their about abusing Kazar. Their dad lives in Iran. Nima made a plan to meet him in Turkey.
Ps I contacted this big law firm in Istanbul to go over and prep for everything before I go talking to them tomorrow and still have to apply for visa. Lol.
Just don't I rather you be safe here with me? Plus, I really want to let the pass go. It's my decision. Thank you and love you. But I'm much rather you be safe here and healthy with me than go chasing after.
That bullshit Hazi Haz Trust me. I got this.
Turkey has no jurisdiction on a crime that did not happen on their soil.
We'll go into it more. Since we already have Interpol records in him, I'm going to use that to get him on Turkey soil. Otherwise, in the airport, Nima.
Didn't make it to Turkey. He made plans, but got arrested for killing Bob before he was able to make the trip. What I take from all of this is that Nima will go to great lengths to feel like he is defending his sister. He would fly to the other side of the world. He would involve lawyers, get visas, reach out to Interpol, even if she asked him not to. The questions prosecutors would eventually ask is if he would
do all that. Would he also stab Bob Lee, especially if he was under the impression, even the mistaken impression, that Bob had done something to his sister. I found about half a dozen people who know Nima, and something that came up frequently was his generosity.
In my experience, he's very nice and generous. Not always the best conversationalist, you know, but like he's very easy to be around, an excellent host, more free with his money than I was. And so he'd want to, you know, be going out to do things, and I'd be like, nah, I don't really want to. He's like, no, no, no, I got it, Come with me, don't worry about it.
David says that Nima would pay freely, but the phrase I got it, don't worry about it was a useful shorthand for many situations.
That was a catchphrase of his don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. I've got this, don't worry about it. I'm not going to tell you don't don't worry about it. Just don't worry about it. You know, he shared, He shared what he shared, and like, I don't think he was hard to get information out of in general, but he chose what he was, you know, offering.
All right, Hi, Hi, can you in yourself? Yes, my name is Ellen Hewitt. I'm a futures writer on the tech team at Bloomberg.
A colleague of mine at Bloomberg, Ellen Hewitt reported on Nima right after he was arrested. She spoke with an anonymous source from Nima's past who had a different read on his personality.
So this person said that Nima often came across as generous, and he would do things like use his boat or use his money to invite people to do things or bring them close to him. But this person observed that there was another layer beneath that, which is that actually Nima might have been fairly socially awkward, and that he was using his generosity as a means to bring people close to him, almost to pay them to spend time with him instead of having an actual connection with these people.
Ellen's source said that behind closed doors, this veneer of generosity faded away.
They really felt like, based on their observations of Nima and his close relationships, especially with women, that he had had severe trauma in his past, and that there was a darkness inside of him that had potentially not been addressed or that would come out in these unexpected ways, either in like verbal aggression or violent tendencies.
You know.
This person said that Nima was a very serious drug user, and that he had been a heavy cocaine user for over a decade, and that his drug use was quite serious. Their observation was that it had exacerbated some of the underlying trauma and violent tendencies within him.
Most of my sources had never seen Nima be violent. Yes, some of his interests were adjacent to violence. Of course, he was into guns and knives. One person said he had a shotgun stowed in a guitar case. He was interested in martial arts, you know, mall ninja stuff. But the people I spoke to felt like physically harming someone was still a leap from the person they knew. However, the record of Nima's history of violence goes beyond that
fight that involved a knife and weed. In August of twenty twenty two, a little less than a year before Nima killed Bob, a woman called nine one one. She told the police that Nima was violent towards her, that he grabbed her by the arm and her waist and pushed her against the counter. She didn't want to press charges, but she did want the police to be present while
she grabbed her things and left Nima's apartment. Part of the police report reads, she says he may be bipolar because one minute he will be fine and the next he will go off for no reason. Mission Local, a news site in San Francisco, also reported that Nima's phone number appeared on a website used by sex workers to
warn each other about dangerous clients. Some of the complaints about Nima include quote definitely unsafe in nature, definitely a boundary pusher and rough snatched me by the hair after I said not to dangerous, uses a lot of coke, erraticant behavior, possessive, heavily armed. These comments were posted anonymously, they cannot be verified, but together with the police report
and the source that my colleagues spoke to. They suggest a man prone to bursts of violence, which he hid from most people.
I wasn't surprised to learn that he was known in this network of sex workers, but I was surprised to learn that he had a bad reputation.
This is David again, Nina's good friend.
It's disappointing, very very disappointing, because I've never thought of him as someone who would escalate violence, you know, not bring a knife to a fistfight, right yeah.
Prosecutors have suggested Momeni's sister was at the center of a confrontation between Momeny and Lee, who were seen together leaving Hussar Momente's apartment building prior to the stabbing. Police eventually released security footage from the night of the murder. It was not good for Nima and it put his sister Khazar in the spotlight. Video from Millennium Towers showed Bob and Nima leaving Kazar's apartment together at two three am.
They climb into Nima's car, Nima drives and then pulls up next to an empty lot under the Bay Bridge. After parking for several minutes. Security footage showed Bob stumbling away from Nima's car and Nima's speeding off. The video shows him driving erratically back across the Bay Bridge to Emeryville, where he lived. He was home in thirteen minutes, about as long as it took for the police to find Bob. The morning of April fourth, at eight am, six hours
after the attack, Kazar called Bob twice. Two hours after that, she texted, Bob.
Just wanted to make sure you're doing okay because I know Nima came down way hard on you, and thank you for being such a classy man handling it with class. Love you.
She sounds concerned, but there's no indication she knows he's dead. At ten pm April fourth, twenty hours after Nima stabbed Bob, Kazar texts.
Nima, Nima, I'm a bit conflicted about you.
Cozi, call me when you're sober. No, Nima, that stuff messes up the mind.
I don't even want to talk about it.
Getting ready, I'll talk to you later.
No, bitch, blow messed up your mind and makes you act lunatic. The Bob thing hit hard.
These texts would eventually be raised at trial as Evan Kazar understanding her brother's role in Bob's death, though she'd later deny it. When police recovered the knife later that day, Nima's DNA was on the handle and Bob's was on the blade. And as a friend, what position does that put you in?
Like?
How do you think about that?
So I guess ultimately I'm more interested and why rather than whether?
Why?
Why? This is what everyone from Bob's family, to Nina's friends to complete strangers on the other side of the world wanted to know why.
For how much the activities of all the people involved have been mapped and tracked over these days, with all of the texts and videos and everything. I couldn't imagine Nima getting so upset that he would kill somebody really for any reason. But then, you know, I think about it. I think there's one reason.
The text messages between Kazar and Nima also provide a possible motive. He texts Kazar referencing Bob.
I don't know what he ended up doing at the bar or strip club. I just came home and started preparing for the rape case against both of them. As I told you, let's talk when you're calm and we can coordinate plans with the attorney. That was a really low point you took all of us to today. Hope you can make better decisions and find some better goals and priorities in life, and start thinking about your place in the world and your impact on the world and
people around you. I'll help start the case against these guys. But you fucked up and fucked all of us over and over and going to have to work your way out of this by yourself.
These texts from Nima are rather evasive, but here's how I read it. He's implying to his sister that he dropped Bob off at a strip club or a bar, and it seems clear he was under the impression that Bob did something to Kazar. This alleged rape that Nima was referring to comes up later in the trial, but Kazar is emphatic that Nima is wrong.
Strip club rape case. Nima, you're fucking psychotic at times. No one enjoys that company. You scare me.
Hope it was worth it. Stop text me. I have nothing to talk to you about. Go do whatever and call whoever you want. You're on your own. You don't need to lie about going to sleep again.
I'm sorry. My heart is just shattered about Bob, like it really is hurting my feelings. We're not perfect, but I just saw him last night. It hurts.
It was a few hours later that news broke that Bob was dead the next day because our text Nima at seven thirty in the morning.
If I find out anyone hurt him, I'll have no mercy.
Good morning. Are you okay? You wake up like an animal when you take this stuff.
No, Nima, I'm not okay. My friend is dead. Nima, Fuck you, You're an animal. Twenty four to seven. I have no more empathy for anyone right now. I'm going to get to the bottom of this and find out what happens to Bob.
Okay, sounds good.
Where do you drop him off? Either I'll ask or the cops will. I want to know.
I talked to an attorney today about your overdose and attempted rape case. Really need you to take a few tests and talk to attorneys as well. Let me know when you're ready to deal with that.
Llolol.
In fact, text mom when you get your shit together.
Lol.
You dumb fuck Bob never touched me, No one did. Your dad did who? You kissed his ass and begged to get his approval. No, I'll call the cops too, since you called them too, call.
Your mom when you're sober. Don't call me or Dino for anything else.
Nope, the cops.
The theory that prosecutors would eventually present goes like this. Nima was under the impression that something happened to Kazar, perhaps rape or an assault. This set Nima off. He was defensive of his sister. He had been his whole life, and for good reason. Nima played it cool that night by offering Bob a ride, but actually he blamed Bob for whatever might have happened, and at that moment, Nima was hiding a peary knife from Kazar's kitchen in his
jacket with the intent to kill Bob. I spoke to one of nima neighbors, who asked to remain anonymous. He recalls an interaction that stuck with him. He said that Nima was in quote a weird state of mind. He called me and asked me if I had any alcohol, can I bring it all over. I thought he was having a party. I had no idea what the hell happened. I just brought it all over. Nima was alone. He was incoherent, more incoherent than normal, unable to tell a
story coherently. He was like, yo, man I don't know. I'm thinking of traveling. Then he tried to give me his new EAMs chair. I said, I can't take this. This is like a two thousand dollars chair. I looked at the call logs to see when Nima dialed his neighbor. It turns out it was twice, just hours after the stabbing.
His life is tarnished. He's probably going to spend a lot of years in jail, His youth is going to be gone by the time he gets out, and nobody's looking at the human part of it.
That family friend Alex Presha again, we.
Love Nima, we love Huszar, but our heart was really broken for Manos because we know the kind of hardship she went through to bring this family to where they're at. It didn't come cheap. This was the very last thing that I think would ever make get on her mind that after all of that hard work that she put into this family and herself, she ends up defending her son.
There are many sad things about the stories of Bob Lee and Nima. MOMENTI to me one of the sadder aspects is that Nima, his sister, and his mom, fled Iran to escape his father's alleged violence. They started over, but even so, Nima seemingly became a violent person himself. He was able to escape his father physically, but not the cycle of abuse. What remains frustrating about this story is the extent to which it does say quite a bit about San Francisco, only not in the way that
venture capitalists and conservative YouTuber's thought. San Francisco is a land of boom and bust. There was the gold rush, then the depression, the dot com boom, and then the dot com crash, the most recent tech boom and the subsequent downturn, and of course we're in the midst of
an ai boom right now. I think that a lot of the issues that you see in San Francisco can be tied to this boom and bust cycle, housing volatility, homelessness, tremendous wealth disparities, and this general sense of social unrest. Boom and bust, boom and bust. That's San Francisco. It's also the momenties in Tehran they were wealthy, then in the US they started with nothing, they slept in the same room of a family friend's house. Then they built
comfortable lives with luxury clothes, cars, boats, the works. You could argue they were the epitome of the American dream. Then came bob Anima's decision to attack him the bust. As facts about the night of the murder continued to stack up, new details and new characters emerged, and as the story came together, it simply couldn't look less like the random act of violence originally alleged online.
Obviously, based on this arrest and the storyline, it's quite different than what we all assumed it to be, which was some sort of homeless robbery type moment that has become all too commonplace in SF.
The person speaking here is David Friedberg, a tech entrepreneur and one of the hosts of the popular All In podcast. In the early days following Bobley's death, Friedberg and his co hosts leaned into this theory that was a random act of violence on the street. Now, Friedberg was walking some of his assumptions back.
When I read this this morning, I was like, Man, I didn't even consider the possibility that this guy was murdered by someone that he knew because I am so enthralled right now by this narrative that SF is so bad, and it must be another data point that validates my point of view on SF.
Two things can be true.
A tolerance for ambiguity is necessary.
His co hosts, however, refused to follow suit.
But I'm saying I didn't even do that. As soon as I heard this, I was like, I was like, oh, a fine assumption to David. That is a fine assumption to me.
The other voices here are co host Jason Calacanis, followed by former PayPal executive David Sachs.
That's a final sociological assumption.
Listen, you made that assumption for our own protection.
David Sachs went on to become President Trump's AI and cryptos are at the time, he had bet that the murderer had been quote a psychotic homeless person.
We got all these reporters who are basically propaganda's trying to claim that crime is down in San Francisco. They're all basically seeking comment for me this morning, sending emails or trying to god on us because we basically talked about the Bobbly case in that way. Listen, that we didn't know what happened, but if we were to bet, at least, what I said is I bet this case it looks like a lot like the Brianna Cuffer case.
Brianna Cuppfer was a twenty four year old woman murdered at work in Los Angeles. The man who killed her was a repeat violent offender.
That was logical.
That's not conditioning or bias. That's logic.
Do you remember your reaction?
You know, it didn't make sense to me then, and now I've seen most of the trial and all of the evidence, and it doesn't make sense to me now.
Nina's friend David Again, I.
Told a someone I was hanging out with the other day about how, you know, Nima's my friend, and they were like, oh, very interested in this, Like oh they know about the case and went on They're like, oh, yeah, I heard it was like a hit job, like somebody you know, blah blah blahlahlah. Like there's been so much
like wild speculation to fill in the gifts. It was clearly a personal dispute of some kind that happened between the two men, and because the right wing media picked it up to say, you know, the san Francisco is going to hell and you know all that stuff, right, Like.
Yeah, and so they they want to be like we got him, and like that shows that we are not the broken city that you're saying we are.
Right, well, it's showing it's a city full of drug use and all night partying and you know a lot of a lot of wild.
Living, a lot of wild living inside the clubs, the drugs and what came to be known as the lifestyle. On the next episode, Foundering is reported hosted an executive produced by me Sean Wen. Eric Mesitzi's mental produced our show. Bart Warshaw is our audio engineer. Our story editors are Joshua Brustin, Tom Giles, Anne vander May, and Nicole Beamster Bower. Voice acting by Mark Leydwarf, Eliza Jabaherry and Ramine Kavon. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show,
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