A 38-year-old Emeryville man was arrested Thursday morning in connection with the April 4 fatal stabbing of Cash App founder Bob Lee, the San Francisco Police Department said.
The man, identified as Nima Momeni, faces murder charges, San Francisco police Chief Bill Scott said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Scott said Momeni and Lee knew each other, but the police chief said repeatedly in the press conference that he could not comment on the nature of their relationship.
“The evidence shows they knew each other and that’s about all I can say right now,” Scott said.
Momeni is an IT consultant and entrepreneur, according to his LinkedIn page. His resume shows he founded a company called Expand IT, and a Yelp page for the company said he started the business in 2010.
“We specialize in providing robust, reliable and effective technology support and service solutions you need to help your business save, succeed and grow more rapidly,” a Yelp description of the company reads. The company has only one four-star Yelp review from 2014.
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Prior to starting Expand IT, Momeni worked as a consultant and systems engineer with a few other local companies, including Coast Range Technologies in San Jose, according to LinkedIn. Coast Range Technologies, which provides IT services to local companies, confirmed with SFGATE that Momeni worked there as both an employee and contractor between 2006 and 2012.
“He was an employee for a couple months,” Russell Haynes, the company’s owner, told SFGATE on the phone. “He always had his own IT thing going on, so he did some contract work for me for a few years after.”
“I’ve called him in on tasks that he was good at,” he added. “He was talented, and he was thorough.”
Akash Sawhney, a Silicon Valley tech engineer, confirmed Momeni’s position as an IT consultant. Sawhney said that when he worked for digital merchandising platform Outward, the company hired Momeni as a consultant to work on a monthlong project.
“We worked on a project for establishing a computer network for a company that I was working for and he was hired as an outside contractor in 2015,” he said.
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Momeni lives in the Besler Building on Harlan Street in Emeryville, and his name is displayed on a call box at the building. He ran his IT business out of the live-work space, according to KCBS Radio.
Longtime Bay Area communications strategist Sam Singer has an East Bay office in the Besler Building next to Momeni’s loft. “I heard from neighbors there was a large police presence, and they used the bullhorn to alert him from outside,” Singer told SFGATE.
Momeni wrote on his LinkedIn page that he attended UC Berkeley, but university spokesperson Dan Mogulof said there’s no record of attendance or graduation.
