Chicago Tribune
Urooj Khan had sworn off playing the lottery after he took an Islamic pilgrimage to the Middle East in 2010, but as he stood in a 7-Eleven near his home on Chicago’s Far North Side this summer, he lost his will for a moment, handing over $60 to buy two instant-game tickets.
After scratching off the second ticket, he leaped in the air, shouting over and over again, “I hit a million!”
When Khan, 46, accepted an oversized check from Illinois Lottery representatives days later at the same store with his wife and teenage daughter at his side, he spoke excitedly of how the winnings would help him grow his dry-cleaning business.
Instead, Khan is dead, a victim of an extraordinary poisoning, and police have a mystery on their hands: Did his lottery winnings create a motive for murder?
The month after winning the million dollars, Khan died unexpectedly on July 20. Finding no trauma to his body and no unusual substances such as cocaine or carbon monoxide in his blood, the Cook County medical examiner’s office declared his death to be from natural causes. He was buried at Rosehill Cemetery.
But the Tribune has learned that Chicago police and county prosecutors are investigating Khan’s death as a homicide.
In an interview, Medical Examiner Stephen J. Cina said that within a week of Khan’s death a concerned relative asked his office to take a closer look at the case.
By early December, the medical examiner’s office determined from comprehensive toxicology tests that Khan had died of a lethal amount of cyanide.
Now authorities are considering exhuming his body to try to find out how much cyanide he ingested or inhaled, Cina disclosed.
While a motive has not been determined yet, police haven’t ruled out that Khan was killed because of his big lottery win, a law enforcement source said.
Preliminary data from Chicago police show that in a violent 2012 — with 506 people slain, the most since 2008 — Khan was the only known homicide victim to be poisoned.
According to an internal police department document obtained by the Tribune, Khan came home from work to his West Rogers Park residence on the night he died. He ate dinner about an hour later and eventually went to bed. He was later heard screaming and was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, where he was pronounced dead, the document said.
His wife and daughter were home when Khan was stricken, according to Cina.
Interviewed last week while working at one of three dry cleaners her husband owned, Khan’s widow, Shabana Ansari, declined to talk with a Tribune reporter about the homicide investigation other than to say she has spoken to police.