We are just three weeks and change from one of the highest-profile murder trials in recent memory in San Francisco, that of Nima Momeni for the April 2023 murder of tech entrepreneur Bob Lee. And in a Friday morning hearing, prosecutors and defense attorneys seemed to spar over the list of planned witnesses.
Having lost their bid for a change of venue, defense attorneys for Nima Momeni appear to be employing another strategy, one of obfuscation when it comes to who will be on the list of witnesses for the defense.
It seems inevitable that Momeni's sister, Khazar Momeni, who has also gone by her married name Khazar Elyassnia, will be among the witnesses called, as she is at the center of the so-far understood motive in the case. However, as Mission Local reports from court today, the prosecution and the defense appear to playing some game of chicken about who will call her — and thus who will get to examine her in cross. Neither team has yet to put her on the witness list.
This is curious, but it obviously has to do with strategy. Per Mission Local, prosecutor Omid Talai told the court Friday that Khazar "is a central, in some ways, percipient witness to the events of that night, who defense has told the press they intend to call as a witness at trial. [And] If they do, now is the time to speak up. Actually, it was last week."
And an attorney for Nima Momeni, Saam Zangeneh, seemed to shrug this off, and referring to the infamous text message from Momeni's sister found by police on Bob Lee's phone. "If they want to leave that piece of evidence unexplained, then that’s fine with me," Zangeneh said, per Mission Local.
The text message, as most of us surely remember, went to Lee's phone around the time he was being brutally stabbed a few blocks away from Khazar Momeni's condo in Millennium Tower. Lee and Nima Momeni had just left the condo after a late-night pow-wow of some kind, and Khazar texted, "Just wanted to make sure your doing ok Cause I know nima came wayyyyyy down hard on you And thank you for being such a classy man handling it with class Love you Selfish pricks."
In pretrial releases of police evidence, we have since learned that on the afternoon prior to the murder, Khazar Momeni, who was married at the time, along with a female friend, met up with Lee at an apartment gathering of some kind at 1550 Mission Street — a luxury apartment tower. Momeni and Lee had apparently had a romantic history together, but Lee was lately living in Miami, and was back in town on business.
As the story goes — and again, none of this has yet been testified to in court but comes from witness statements made public — Momeni's friend says she woke up in the bedroom of the apartment, which belonged to a noted drug dealer, to find "Khazar crying and dressed in only a bikini," and she believed they were roofied, or something like that. Momeni called her brother to pick her up, or to come meet her, and that allegedly set off the subsequent events of the evening. There was also an allegation that Nima Momeni had threatened to kill the drug dealer, whose name was Jeremy.
The Momeni siblings, back at Khazar's condo, ultimately (allegedly) called Lee, who was staying at a nearby hotel, to come over, which he did around midnight that night. And then Lee and Nima Momeni were seen on surveillance video riding an elevator together and leaving in Momeni's BMW about two hours later, around 2 am. Within about 20 minutes, Lee would be stabbed. A kitchen knife from Khazar's condo was missing, according to investigators, and a bloody knife was later found near a fence by the base of the Bay Bridge, near where the stabbing allegedly occurred.
The defense may try to spin this as a self-defense case, or something else. That is unclear. Per Mission Local, among the prosecutors' gripes Friday is also a short list of expert witnesses, the nature of whose testimony has been kept very vague. These are retired SFPD Sgt. Steven Pomatto and forensic pathologist Dr. John Marraccini.
There is also the big question of whether Nima Momeni will take the stand in his own defense. The defense attorneys have told the press that they intend to call him to the stand, however they are being more cagey about that now.
Incidentally, today was Momeni's 40th birthday, and as Mission Local reports, his mother was in the courtroom with a birthday sign and some cake, which was handed out to people, though Momeni himself could not have any.
The trial of Nima Momeni begins September 16, unless it is again delayed.
