A doctor and former medical examiner, who is being brought into court as an expert witness by the defense, is expected to testify that CashApp founder Bob Lee may have been holding the knife he was killed with last year. The defense contends that in self-defense, Nima Momeni, the man on trial for Lee’s murder, turned it around on him.
John Marraccini, a witness expected to testify in Momeni’s defense in coming weeks, suggested today during a hearing in San Francisco Superior Court that the evidence in the case was consistent with someone defensively turning the knife on Lee on April 4, 2023. The prosecution is likely to argue that Momeni attacked Lee from the front.
That night, Lee and Momeni left a party together at the Millennium Tower home of Momeni’s sister, Khazar, and stood together in the Rincon Hill neighborhood, near the Bay Bridge. A blurry surveillance video shows one figure lunging towards the other, before Lee walked away and bled out in the street while Momeni sped away in his car.
The murder trial kicked off last week with motions about the admissibility of evidence and witnesses from both sides. Most of the hearings have been held behind closed doors for the past week “so as not to taint any potential jury pool,” according to Judge Alexandra Gordon.
Today, in the first public hearing on whether a proposed witness will testify during the trial, Marraccini said the spot where Lee was stabbed — his right hip — was an “atypical location for a willful direct assault.”
“It is consistent with Mr. Lee withdrawing a knife from [his] right pocket with his [Lee’s] right hand,” Marraccini wrote in a statement, “and having this knife (still in Lee’s hand) redirected into the right side of [his] body by the defensive actions of the defendant.”
Marraccini argued that Lee’s hip wound was on the opposite side than would be expected if the two men were facing each other and Momeni was armed with his right hand.
“[Lee] had the weapon. He drew the weapon. The evidence that our experts, the scientific evidence, supports our theory,” said attorney Saam Zangeneh after the hearing.
Momeni’s attorneys have been building a self-defense strategy for some time. Tomorrow, another hearing about a potential use-of-force expert witness from the San Francisco Police Department is expected to speak further to this strategy.
Today, Zangeneh elaborated that the defense’s premise is that Momeni “stood his ground, and he used the amount of force necessary to make sure that he wasn’t hurt, that he didn’t sustain substantial serious bodily injury or death.”
But it is unclear whether these theories will stand up in court. During questioning today, Marraccini agreed that there could have been other hypothetical series of events that could have led to Lee’s stab wounds. Moreover, he did not address the question of why Momeni sped away and left Lee to bleed out.
And prosecutors’ take on the nature of Lee’s stab wounds is uncertain.
In fact, Zangeneh today asked directly in court what the District Attorney’s Office’s theory is, but got few answers. In the past, the DA’s office has outlined that they believe Momeni was motivated to stab Lee because he had slept with his sister, but they have not delved into the specific nature of his wounds.
“Our theory of the case is that Mr. Momeni stabbed and murdered Mr. Lee,” said Dane Reinstedt, a prosecutor on the case, on Wednesday.
“How?” asked Zangeneh.
“I don’t think that there’s any requirement that we talk about that right now,” Reinstedt said.
The judge agreed.
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