A year and a half after technology executive Bob Lee was slain on a downtown San Francisco street, a lawyer for the acquaintance accused of stabbing him told a jury it was an act of self-defense while Lee was binging on illegal drugs.

After a prosecutor promised during the trial’s opening arguments Monday that video footage and DNA evidence would prove that Nima Momeni is guilty of attacking Lee, Momeni’s attorney sought to flip the script — and cast Lee as the aggressor.

“Nima had to stand his ground against someone who had barely slept during a 90-hour span, that was utilizing cocaine the entire time,” Saam Zangeneh said.

Lee was revered by the San Francisco Bay Area’s tech community as a master coder who helped develop Google’s Android and Square’s Cash App before becoming a top executive at MobileCoin. The April 2023 killing of the 43-year-old father of two drew nationwide attention and at first fueled speculation that he was a random victim of violence in a city falling into postpandemic lawlessness.

The narrative shifted sharply when police arrested Momeni, a fellow technology entrepreneur who knew Lee, and charged him with premeditated murder, alleging that the men got into an argument over Momeni’s sister, Khazar, before they left her luxury apartment together late at night.

The trial marks a high-profile test for San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who had been a prosecutor in the office for seven years before she was appointed to her post by Mayor London Breed with a tough-on-crime agenda, following the 2022 recall of progressive DA Chesa Boudin.

But a verdict in the Momeni case is unlikely before Jenkins faces voters Nov. 5 in her bid to be elected to a four-year term. Her office has said the trial could take two months, with testimony scheduled four days a week.

While a prosecutor cast Momeni as being overprotective of his sister, Zangeneh said text messages between the men were cordial — and undercut the notion that there was bad blood.

“This motive that they’re trying to tell you — it doesn’t exist, and we have the text messages between Bob and Nima to prove it,” he said.

The defense lawyer also had a different take on video clips that the jury will see.

Assistant District Attorney Omid Talai had said security camera footage of the attack showed Momeni throwing the murder weapon over a nearby fence to hide his crime. In contrast, Zangeneh said Momeni picks up the knife and “gingerly flips it over the fence” after taking it from Lee in self-defense.

Likewise, what the prosecutor described as a reenactment of the murder — police video footage of Momeni pantomiming stabbing motions outside his attorney’s office — was portrayed by Zangeneh as evidence of innocence. The defense lawyer said the video shows Momeni not pretending to stab Lee but evading Lee’s attack.

“Somebody’s dead. Nobody likes that, but you have the right to defend yourself,” Zangeneh said. “And that’s what Nima Momeni did.”

Momeni wore a blue suit in court Monday and appeared to have gained weight during the months he has been held in custody. Lee’s ex-wife, who sat in the spectators’ gallery, cried when the prosecutor described Lee’s 911 call, during which he said “help” 47 times. A recording of that call was played for the jury before prosecutors called their first witness, a police officer who attended to Lee while he was unconscious and bloodied in the city’s downtown.

It’s unclear whether jurors will hear from Momeni, 40, who ran an IT consulting business and had previous run-ins with police, including one over his alleged stabbing of a couple of teenagers in 2005. But his sister Khazar could be a key witness, as she was in an overlapping social circle with the two men, both of whom were known to enjoy partying.

An autopsy report released by the city medical examiner’s office weeks after Lee’s slaying showed that he had cocaine, ketamine and alcohol in his body when he died.

The prosecutor told the jury evidence will show that after Momeni picked up his sister from a party that Lee had also attended at another man’s residence the day before the slaying, Momeni acted like a “wanna-be tough guy who wants some answers” and confronted Lee in a phone conversation about what had happened at the apartment “with the girls getting naked.”

Momeni’s lawyers argue he wouldn’t have been angry at Lee, but at the man who had hosted the party — where Khazar allegedly took a date-rape drug. She was later seen waking up, crying and calling her husband and Nima for a ride home.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harry Dorfman, who last year ordered Momeni to stand trial, said at the time that he viewed the evidence against the defendant as “very strong.” A different judge is overseeing the jury trial.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.