At Momeni’s Emeryville apartment building, Chris Donatiello said he was woken up around 5 a.m. by the sound of half a dozen police officers ordering Momeni out of his apartment.
Though he didn’t know him well, Donatiello described Momeni as a gregarious, affable neighbor he frequently waved at in the parking lot where Momeni kept his small sailboat. Another neighbor, Emily Pia, said Momeni enjoyed partying and was one of the nicest people she knew in the building.
On April 4, around 2:30 a.m., police officers found Lee suffering from stab wounds in a residential neighborhood near the city’s downtown area.
The killing shook San Francisco, and an absence of concrete details led to a torrent of unsubstantiated claims that Lee had fallen victim to a city overrun by random street crime, even though data shows violent crime is relatively low in the metro area.
ExpandIT has offices in Emeryville and San Mateo. The tech entrepreneur previously worked as an IT consultant and attended University of California, Berkeley, according to his LinkedIn.
Lee, 43, and known to his friends as “Crazy Bob,” was chief product officer at MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency company. In interviews with The Washington Post, friends described Lee as a warmhearted and tenacious entrepreneur whose goal was to better the world through his financial technology endeavors.
Lee also worked on Android at Google before working to help small businesses with Square and launching Cash App, which has become one of the most popular mobile payment apps, enabling people to directly send each other money.
Lee was a “hardcore, purpose-driven person,” said Mark R. Hatch, a fellow Silicon Valley CEO who met Lee when he ran a TechShop for makers. “The underlying thread, I believe, is this incredible passion for humanity and the desire to change it to the good.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Mark reported from Washington, D.C. Velazco reported from San Francisco.
