A longtime San Francisco police inspector and use-of-force trainer who believes it “likely” that Nima Momeni stabbed CashApp founder Bob Lee in self-defense may be called to testify before a jury in coming weeks.
Today, during a pretrial hearing before San Francisco Superior Court Judge Alexandra Gordon, retired officer Steve Pomatto said it was “the most likely scenario” that Momeni struggled to pin Lee’s hand, which carried a knife, and that resulted in Lee being stabbed three times in April 2023.
“Everything else just doesn’t seem as reasonable as the conclusion that I came up with,” Pomatto said, “or that, in my opinion, the physical and digital evidence supports.”
Though prosecutor Assistant District Attorney Omid Talai tried today to have Pomatto, a defense witness, excluded from the trial altogether, Gordon reserved her decision for after Momeni’s own testimony, which is expected in coming weeks.
Talai called the theory “laughable,” and argued that Pomatto should not be allowed to testify.
“I’m concerned for the 23 years he was a peace officer, frankly,” Talai said — after asking for Pomatto to leave the courtroom. “Many of the answers just made no sense, were not responsive.”
If he is permitted to testify, Pomatto’s testimony will be potentially significant as a former police officer going up against the District Attorney’s Office in defense of a murder suspect. Pomatto, a recently retired SFPD inspector who trained police cadets in use-of-force and defensive tactics, was still employed by the police department when Momeni was arrested for Lee’s murder in April 2023.
Pomatto has never before testified on behalf of a criminal defendant, according to Momeni’s attorney Tony Brass.
Momeni and Lee left the home of Momeni’s sister, Khazar, in the early morning hours of April 4. 2023. They were seen in surveillance camera footage standing together near the Bay Bridge, and though footage shows one figure lunge at the other, it is unclear how exactly the altercation left Lee with three stab wounds that killed him. Afterward, Momeni drove away, retained an attorney, then was arrested in Emeryville nine days later.
Prosecutors have presented the incident as a premeditated attack in which Momeni, upset about some perceived liaison between Lee and Khazar, stabbed Lee and left him to die.
Pomatto, however, presented an alternate theory that Lee could have held the knife and Momeni turned it around on him in self defense. He said Lee’s horizontal wounds and their high placement on his body made a direct attack from Momeni “unlikely.”
The wounds were “very inconsistent with a knife attack that would put the knife in [Momeni’s] hand,” Pomatto said. “It’s not consistent with any investigations that I’ve ever done that you’re getting a horizontal, especially in the upper torso.”
Pomatto could bolster claims expected from another witness, John Marraccini, a doctor and medical examiner who said yesterday that Lee’s wounds were consistent with a defensive maneuver by Momeni.
Momeni’s attorneys said he practiced martial arts like jiu jitsu and Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defense practice. His mother today also said that Momeni trained in defensive measures early on, as he was being bullied at school, and that children begin training at a young age for military service in Iran, where Momeni grew up.
In a statement provided ahead of his hearing today, Pomatto wrote that he believes “there is nothing about the location, trajectory, or metrics of the wounds in this case that supports the theory that Mr. Momeni was the attacker.”
Talai implied Pomatto was making impossible speculations from the blurry surveillance footage of Lee and Momeni.
“He’s literally telling us the exact sequence, as if this is like a Jason Bourne/Mission Impossible movie,” Talai said. “This is what happened. The knife came here. He grabbed it. He redirected. He stabbed him here. He stabbed him there.”
The judge in this case in the coming week will begin narrowing down a jury pool, and jury selection with attorneys is expected to start on Oct. 7.
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