Arrest Made in Murder of Crypto Startup Exec: Reports

An arrest has been made in last week’s San Francisco slaying of Bob Lee, chief product officer of crypto startup MobileCoin Inc. and a well known figure in Silicon Valley, according to a local news reports.

The San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the nearby city of Emeryville in the April 4 stabbing of Lee, and the suspect also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew, Mission Local reported, without identifying the source of its information.

Representatives of the police department and the city’s district attorney declined to comment on the news reports. The police department scheduled a news conference at 12:30 pm local time to provide an update on the homicide investigation.

Lee’s brother, Tim Oliver Lee, thanked police for “bringing this person to justice so quickly” in a social media post, as did San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents the district where Lee was killed.

Lee died after being stabbed multiple times in the middle of the night in a deserted area of San Francisco’s downtown, in what the city’s district attorney called a “senseless act of violence.”

The police department said officers found a 43-year-old man with stab wounds after responding to a call at 2:35 a.m., and the person later died at the hospital.

Lee was the first chief technology officer of Square, the startup co-founded by Jack Dorsey, and now called Block Inc.

While at the company, he created CashApp, a money transfer tool that lets users buy stocks and Bitcoin. Earlier in his career, he helped develop Android while working as a software engineer for Google.

The fatal attack of a high-profile executive in a downtown neighborhood near the city’s financial district came as a blow to efforts by city officials to reverse the narrative of San Francisco as a crime-ridden city.