Tech guru Bob Lee called 911 and said he was bleeding out as he lay dying from stab wounds on a San Francisco street, new audio revealed.
Police found the 43-year-old unconscious on the pavement at around 2.40am on Tuesday, about six minutes after he called 911 to say that he had been stabbed and was bleeding heavily, according to The San Francisco Standard.
Lee was taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where he passed away.
Little information has been released about the stabbing and the authorities haven’t shared any details about a possible suspect.
Lee was the chief product officer at MobileCoin – a crypto company, a former executive at Square – a payment firm now called Block, and the founder of Cash App, also a payment app.
He made the 911 call to report that he had been attacked at 2.34am on 4 April, yelling “help” several times and telling the dispatcher that he had been stabbed and that he was bleeding out, The Standard notes.
The dispatcher can then be heard telling officers about what has happened.
“There’s a male screaming ‘help,’ saying, ‘someone stabbed me,’” the dispatcher says in 911 audio shared online. “Advised he is bleeding out.”
On Thursday, police offered no fresh details about the investigation, sharing a video on social media in which spokesperson Sgt Adam Lobsinger said: “There is no place for this kind of violent crime against anyone in our city”.
“We want to assure everyone that our investigators are working tirelessly to make an arrest and bring justice to Mr. Lee and his loved ones, just as we try to do in every homicide that occurs in our city,” he added.
Lee was killed close to the Embarcadero waterfront, an area that is home to offices for tech companies. It also has a number of condo buildings, leaving it fairly inactive late at night, the Associated Press noted.
Lee had returned to San Francisco for a visit after moving to Miami in October of last year, according to a Facebook post shared by his father Rick Lee. They had previously been living in Mill Valley, a suburb of San Francisco.
“Bob would give you the shirt off his back,” the father wrote. “He would never look down on anyone and adhered to a strict no-judgment philosophy. Bobby worked harder than anyone and was the smartest person I have ever known.”
Tommy Sowers, a friend of the tech executive, told the AP that Lee didn’t follow the “tech bro” stereotype, but instead had an “innate kindness”.
The two met at a Washington, DC fundraiser when Mr Sowers, a veteran of the war in Iraq and a former Green Beret, was running for Congress.
Lee was working for Square at the time, and he was pushing an app that could be useful for campaign fundraising. Both Lee and Mr Sowers hailed from Missouri. Lee’s children would accompany the men for hikes and dinners and it wasn’t rare for Lee to stay out late, Mr Sowers told the news agency.
“I’d want to go to bed at like nine. He talked me into going someplace till midnight, and then he’d be like, ‘Well, there’s another one,’ and you’d go to that. And he’s like, ‘There’s another one.’ He just had real boundless energy,” he said.
