Two men’s lives were irreversibly upended in San Francisco last April. Bob Lee, a successful and beloved tech executive was stabbed to death. His killer, Nima Momeni, now faces up to life in prison. But there was another casualty at the center of the case: Momeni’s sister, Khazar.
As one of the last people to see Momeni and Lee before the stabbing, Khazar Momeni was subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify in her brother’s murder trial. On the stand, she admitted to being high on a cocktail of substances in the days and hours leading up to Lee’s death, and only having fragmented memories of that time.
This gave both sides in the trial ample opportunity to attack Khazar Momeni’s character and reputation, painting her as an unstable and unreliable witness while still heavily relying on her testimony to make their cases. Under prosecutors’ and defense attorneys’ questioning, key witnesses on both sides — Momeni, Khazar’s friend Aranza Villegas, and Lee’s friend Bo Mohazzabi — cast Khazar as untrustworthy.
This position, Momeni’s attorney Tony Brass told Mission Local, was tough for Khazar but useful for her brother. “She feels guilty, she probably feels responsible, and she has these divided loyalties.”
During her four days on the witness stand in October, Khazar seemed to try to “cleanse her guilt” by saying “whatever she perceives to be helping her brother,” Brass added. “I think she was exploited in that way, and scapegoated as in league with the villains, in a sense.”
She seemed to think she had no option. “He’s my family … Wouldn’t you take care of your family?” Khazar said in response to a prosecutor’s question on her second day of testimony. She and her husband, a successful plastic surgeon, have also helped finance her brother’s legal defense, though neither appeared in court on Tuesday to hear the jury convict Momeni of second-degree murder.
In the end, neither her testimony nor her financial help spared Momeni a conviction that could put him in prison for life.
Khazar stayed loyal to her brother, despite her plan, according to her text messages, to “get to the bottom” of Lee’s killing and “find out what happened.” By many accounts, Momeni had long played the protector of his younger sister, including from their allegedly abusive father, who was one of the reasons the siblings and their mother fled Iran decades ago.
Brass said the defense team realized Khazar’s inclination to help her older brother, and ran with it.
“She just got on the ‘yes’ train with us … the idea was she’s saying ‘yes’ to whatever we’re asking,” Brass said. Whether the defense asked about Lee being pushy towards her, Momeni being polite and considerate, or Khazar making bad decisions, the answer was always “yes.”
The defense attorneys used Khazar’s testimony to portray Lee as “erratic” and “aggressive,” to bolster her brother’s claim that he had stabbed Lee in self-defense. At the same time, they called her untrustworthy in an attempt to discredit texts she sent to her brother around the time of Lee’s death.
Khazar assisted the defense in that, too. “When I get upset, I exaggerate and get dramatic,” she said on the stand, after being shown a text in which she appears to threaten to call the police on her brother over the circumstances around Lee’s death.
“This is not the real me talking,” she said. “It’s not my real personality.”
The prosecution also leaned on Khazar’s testimony. Still, Brass said, “we exploited her more than they did, which didn’t feel great.”
For their part, prosecutors challenged Khazar Momeni’s claims of having been sexually assaulted by Lee’s friend and drug dealer Jeremy Boivin. “No one actually sexually assaulted you, right?” asked prosecutor Dane Reinstedt. Khazar Momeni, sitting at the witness stand, responded firmly: “I was.”
Despite publicly doubting Khazar’s memory of the assault, prosecutors still relied on it to establish a motive for Nima Momeni to murder Lee as retribution for introducing his sister to Boivin and leaving her alone with him.
“Would you say it’s fair that if someone thinks that their sister was date-raped with drugs, that a person would be very, very angry about that?” homicide prosecutor Omid Talai asked Nima Momeni when he took the witness stand in mid-November.
Despite a demure and soft-spoken outward appearance, Khazar publicly laid out another side of her life, one that included excessive drug use, harsh or flippant text messages, and being the alleged victim of multiple sexual assaults. Her two DUI arrests last year were amplified by the press closely following the case.
All this appeared to be aimed at saving her only sibling, who calls Khazar his best friend.
“My experience with them — besides them being wild … they’re the kind of people that, whatever you’re going through, they’ll take care of you,” said a former friend of Khazar’s who wished to be identified only as Ed. “Same thing with her mom and brother … they make you feel welcome, they don’t care where you’re coming from, they make you feel like family.”
He said Momeni was extremely protective of Khazar: “You could do anything to him, but don’t touch his sister.” And so, Khazar, it seems, saw the trial as her turn to repay her brother, and she paid dearly.
“Her credibility is zero,” said defense attorney Saam Zangeneh in his closing argument. “I’m not resting on a thing that girl said. Not a thing.”
In the end, though, everyone rested on Khazar when it suited their side, no matter how it suited her.
“I don’t think she knew how brutal and disrespectful the process would be,” Brass said. “I think she’s picking up the pieces of her life now.”
Considering this entire situation was a result of Khazar accusing Boivin of sexual assault only to continue having sexual relations with him, long after Bob Lee was murdered, makes it impossible for most, including myself, to have any empathy for her whatsoever.
I will agree that both sides were pretty brutal when speaking directly to the jury about her and that it must’ve been particularly difficult and upsetting for their mother to have to sit through, but since Khazar herself was never there during the trial (outside of her own testimony), she was actually spared the worst by not ever hearing what was said about her. She got off pretty damn easy if you ask me. If you want to feel bad for anyone from the Momeni side, it should be for the mother of both Nima and Khazar…not only did she show up every single day (98% of that time, alone) to support her son, she must’ve felt tortured listening to the horrible things being said about both of her children for 6 weeks straight.
At the end of the day, Khazar put herself in this position by crying wolf. It was she who had her friend Aranza call Nima asking to be picked up from Boivin’s apt..and it was she who claimed she was sexually assaulted (presumably to take the heat off of her for getting so messed in the first place). All of that might’ve been true, at least in her own mind, BUT let’s not forget she was then later found in her Marital bed with him (Boivin) the very next day. In fact if she hadn’t kicked Bob and Nima out of her home at 2am just so Boivin could come over (with text messages proving so) Bob Lee might very well still be alive today!
On a side note, I am grateful to know the Lee family said today that they were satisfied with the jury’s verdict. This Friday is Bob Lee’s birthday and I’m sure that now that this chapter is finally coming to an end, his loved ones might actually be able to celebrate his memory with some real joy and perhaps now the healing process can truly begin for them.
Poor Khazar! One person’s “Took the fall” is another person’s “precipitated an innocent man’s murder as a result of her drama queen antics.”
Please no more article, this case is now close. But to paint the sister as a “victim” is a little “humorous”.The girl is a train wreck.
The lady needs to go to that addiction farm that advertises in TV
In society, to be a murderer and a decent human are mutually exclusive. I take the Sister Helen approach and don’t see it that way.
That said, it’s time for Momeni to take responsibility for what he’s done and show remorse to Lee’s family. Khazar too needs to face the music, face the family.
Second that. Really nice reporting here, by the way. I suspect we’ll soon see a large civil suit by the Lee family against everyone in the Momeni clan, including by marriage. A conspiracy claim brings everyone into the liability fold.
Which is a bummer in the sense that possibility precludes repentance. I remember when I was a commercial driver, one of the rules for a post-collision conversation were ‘never say “I’m sorry.'”