Tech executive Bob Lee walked up an empty San Francisco street in the early hours of Tuesday gripping his side with one hand and his cellphone in the other, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

“Help!” he screamed into his phone. “Someone stabbed me.”

Those were some of the last words Lee said on a 911 call before collapsing on a Rincon Hill sidewalk, according to surveillance footage and records reviewed exclusively by The Standard.

Lee, the 43-year-old chief product officer of MobileCoin, was taken to San Francisco General Hospital and later died. Police say he suffered two stab wounds to the chest. His death has triggered a flurry of outrage from the tech industry over the state of public safety in San Francisco.

While police have released scant details about the stabbing, including whether they believe the attack was random or targeted, The Standard has pieced together new information about Lee’s final hours.

Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard shows Lee, who had already been stabbed, walking up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge at around 2:30 a.m. Lee crosses the intersection at Harrison Street and walks up to a parked white Camry with its hazard lights flashing.

Lee then lifts his shirt—as if to show the driver his wound and ask for help—and falls to the ground after the car drives away, the footage shows. He gets up and walks back toward the Bay Bridge before falling to the ground again outside an apartment building called the Portside.

At some point, Lee dialed 911 and repeatedly screamed for help, saying he needed to go to the hospital, according to the records reviewed by The Standard. Lee made the call at 2:34 a.m. and police arrived on the scene less than six minutes later.

Lee was unconscious when officers found him on the ground, police said.

Wednesday morning, The Standard saw workers cleaning up what appeared to be blood on the sidewalk and wall outside the building where Lee collapsed. Across the street, a trail of blood led up the sidewalk from beneath the Bay Bridge toward Harrison Street.Police have not announced any arrests or suspects.

In his first public comments addressing the killing, SFPD Chief Bill Scott declined to say whether the stabbing was random.

“I have nothing to share yet,” Scott said at a Police Commission meeting on Wednesday evening. “We don’t want to be premature and definitely we don’t want to speculate so we are going to be thoughtful about following the evidence and we’ll put out what we’ll put out as soon as we can.”

In a later statement, Scott added: “I would like to express my deepest condolences to the family, friends and loved ones of Mr. Lee. There is no place for this kind of violent crime against anyone in our city. I 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 on every homicide that occurs in our city.”

The stabbing stunned those who say the neighborhood, which is also called the East Cut, isn’t dangerous.

“Both the reality and the feel of the neighborhood is the East Cut is very safe,” said Andrew Robinson, who heads the East Cut Community Benefit District. “So the shock and the unease for people is pretty significant.”

Lee, who was a father and a longtime member of the Bay Area software development community, had recently moved to Miami. Back in 2011, he became Square’s first CTO and was the developer of its Cash App (formerly called Square Cash). In 2021, Lee became the chief product officer of MobileCoin, a crypto payment company based in San Francisco.

Lee’s father, Rick Lee, eulogized his son on Facebook on Wednesday, saying, “I just lost my best friend” and “Bobby worked harder than anyone and was the smartest person I have ever known.”

The stabbing of tech executive Bob Lee took place in a normally quiet part of Rincon Hill on Tuesday morning. The neighborhood is part of the broader SoMa area of San Francisco, with borders of Folsom Street to the north, Bryant Street to the south, and 2nd Street to the west.

The Rincon Hill area is one of just a few in the city that has 24/7 private security patrolling the neighborhood. At the time of the stabbing, two security guards were driving their nightly route around a 67-block radius that includes Rincon Hill, and were not nearby, said Andrew Robinson, executive director of the East Cut Community Benefit District. The security is funded by residents in the area through property taxes.

“The shock and trauma on top of this is the people that live and work here, this is not our experience,” he said. “… This isn’t a common experience in the neighborhood.”

Robinson said residents can call the security patrol with any issues, but the patrol gets very few calls.

Rincon Hill is in the Southern San Francisco police district, and this is the first homicide of the year for the district, according to preliminary police data. Three total homicides occurred in the neighborhood in 2022, down from 6 in 2021. Since the start of 2023, there have been 12 homicides in San Francisco, according to police data. At this time last year, there had been 10.

Incidents of assault are up in the area compared with last year at this time: 92 have been reported so far this year and just 72 were reported by this time last year. Meanwhile, larceny theft is down nearly 50% in the area.

According to the neighborhood’s Nextdoor page, it has 5,665 residents with an average age of 45 years old. Sixty-one percent of its residents are homeowners. Rincon Hill is within San Francisco’s District 6, which also includes Civic Center, Mid-Market, SoMa, Yerba Buena, South Beach, Mission Bay and Treasure Island, and is represented by Supervisor Matt Dorsey. The city’s districts do not mirror the police districts.

Rincon Hill is home to many prominent San Francisco companies, including Google, Mozilla and Gap, as well as the West Coast campus of the Wharton School. It encompasses a stretch of the city’s Embarcadero, including Rincon Park, which features the famous bow and arrow statue “Cupid’s Span” by artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

The majority of residences in the neighborhood are luxury condos built in the 2000s and 2010s, many of which overlook the waterfront and the Bay Bridge.

While the development of San Francisco boomed during the Gold Rush, the area was home to many wealthy citizens with homes overlooking the water. The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed much of the neighborhood and most of those residents moved to burgeoning Nob Hill, while the area became mostly industrial until the redevelopment efforts in the late 1990s.

Katy Liddell, a resident of the neighborhood since 1995, said Rincon Hill typically feels very safe during the day, but she wouldn’t go walking around alone at night. She helped found the neighborhood association and was its president for 10 years.

Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard shows Lee, who had already been stabbed, walking up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge at around 2:30 a.m. Lee crosses the intersection at Harrison Street and walks up to a parked white Camry with its hazard lights flashing.  Lee then lifts his shirt—as if to show the driver his wound and ask for help—and falls to the ground after the car drives away, the footage shows. He gets up and walks back toward the Bay Bridge before falling to the ground again outside an apartment building called the Portside.

At some point, Lee dialed 911 and repeatedly screamed for help, saying he needed to go to the hospital, according to the records reviewed by The Standard. Lee made the call at 2:34 a.m. and police arrived on the scene less than six minutes later.