Law enforcement officials announced on Thursday that they had detained a friend of the well-known tech executive and would prosecute him with murder, nine days after the fatal late-night stabbing of Bob Lee sparked a fierce uproar about public safety in San Francisco.
Nima Momeni, a 38-year-old computer entrepreneur and consultant whom family members claimed Mr. Lee knew personally, was named by the authorities as the suspect in the killing.
Mr. Momeni, the owner of an enterprise IT company in the East Bay city of Emeryville, was detained there following a thorough investigation that took place in opposition to vehement assertions that the killing was an example of a city where the professional class was prone to arbitrary attacks. Mr. Momeni was lodged in the San Francisco County Jail on Thursday morning, and his arraignment on a murder charge is set for Friday. However, they argued that Mr. Lee’s killing did not match that pattern during a news conference. Law enforcement officials acknowledged growing concerns about random violence and property crimes in the city.
Bill Scott, the city’s police chief, stated that “this has nothing to do with San Francisco; it has to do with human nature.”
The city’s Democratic state senator, Scott Wiener, argued that the hasty conclusions reached by Silicon Valley heavyweights like Elon Musk and Mr. Lee’s associates were both incorrect and harmful to San Francisco, which has been struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Oliver Lee, Mr. Lee’s brother, who lives in Palo Alto, California, said in an interview on Thursday that his family had suffered greatly as a result of the attempts to “co-opt” the tragedy. He added that young people would approach his brother on the street there and seek for assistance. “Bob loved being in San Francisco, and San Francisco loved Bob,” he said.