Urooj Khan
He won $1 million on a Chicago scratch-off in June 2012. The Illinois Lottery cut the cheque on July 19. He died the next day, and the death was first recorded as natural causes. Six months later the medical examiner reclassified it as cyanide poisoning — a homicide. No one has ever been charged.
Urooj Khan ran dry-cleaning shops on the north side of Chicago. In June 2012 he bought an instant lottery ticket at a 7-Eleven and won $1 million. He took the lump sum, which after withholding came to roughly $425,000.
The Illinois Lottery issued the cheque on July 19, 2012. He died on July 20, at 46.
The Cook County medical examiner's office initially recorded the death as natural causes. Then a relative — never publicly identified; his widow has said it was not her and that she does not know who it was — asked for expanded toxicology. On January 8, 2013, the office revised the finding: lethal cyanide poisoning, and the manner of death homicide.
His body was exhumed later that month for a full autopsy. Reporting at the time said it produced no decisive new evidence. No one has been charged. In 2017 the Chicago Tribune described the case as unsolved five years on. It remains so as of August 2026.
No will, a widow, and a daughter from a previous relationship
Khan died intestate. He left a widow, Shabana Ansari, and a daughter, Jasmeen Khan, then 17, from a previous relationship. He also left dry-cleaning businesses, residential and commercial real estate, vehicles, and bank accounts. Ansari put the estate at over $1.2 million, with the lottery cheque the single largest liquid item.
The probate fight started before the homicide finding. In September 2012, Khan's brother Imtiaz Khan and sister Meraj Khan petitioned the Cook County probate court to freeze the lottery cheque, contending that Jasmeen might not receive her fair share under the proposed distribution. Meraj Khan also petitioned for guardianship of the teenager. Ansari filed her own petition to administer the estate, and the court granted it, with the estate frozen pending a division.
That is what an intestate estate with a blended family looks like in practice: a widow and a child of a prior relationship, statutory shares that do not match anybody's expectations, and a third party — here, siblings — with enough standing to freeze everything while the court works it out.
The case settled in December 2013, roughly seventeen months after the death. The reported terms of the property split differ between accounts, but they agree on the headline: the widow took one-third of the lottery proceeds and the daughter two-thirds. Illinois intestacy would have split the estate half and half between a spouse and a single child. The settlement moved the lottery money away from that default.
The settlement carried one clause that tells you everything about the posture of this case: neither woman may bring a wrongful death action unless new evidence emerges from the criminal investigation, or one of them is charged.
A killer with no name
Every US state has a slayer rule: a person who unlawfully and intentionally kills the decedent cannot inherit from them. Illinois has one. Florida has §732.802. They are among the oldest and least controversial principles in succession law.
A slayer rule needs a slayer. Here there was a homicide finding and no identified killer — which means the rule had nothing to attach to and the estate had to be divided among the people who were, so far as any court had determined, simply the heirs.
This is the uncomfortable structural point. Probate does not pause indefinitely. Assets have to be marshalled, creditors noticed, taxes filed, and beneficiaries paid. A probate court cannot hold a $1.2 million estate open for a decade waiting on an investigation that may never produce a defendant. So it does what it did here: it applies the intestacy statute, or approves a settlement the parties negotiate, and the money moves.
What the parties then did — writing a wrongful-death standstill into the settlement — is the private workaround. It preserved the claim if the criminal case ever moves, without holding the estate hostage to it. That clause was the most sophisticated document in the file.
Nothing about the death. A great deal about the rest.
It is worth being precise about what planning does and does not fix, because this case invites overclaiming.
A will would not have prevented Khan's death and would not have solved the homicide. It also would not have overridden a spouse's statutory protections — no state lets you disinherit a surviving spouse outright.
What a will and a trust would have changed is everything else. Who administers the estate would have been named rather than contested. The daughter's share would have been defined by Khan rather than by a statute and a negotiation. A minor's money would have been held in trust by a trustee he chose, instead of requiring a guardianship petition from a relative. And the lottery proceeds could have been directed into a structure the moment the ticket was validated, rather than sitting as a cheque in a decedent's name with three sets of lawyers arguing about it.
Seventeen months of litigation over a $425,000 cheque. A will costs a fraction of one month of that.
Timeline
- June 2012Urooj Khan buys an instant lottery ticket at a Chicago 7-Eleven and wins $1 million. He elects the lump sum — roughly $425,000 after withholding.
- Jul 19, 2012The Illinois Lottery issues the cheque.
- Jul 20, 2012Khan dies at 46. The Cook County medical examiner initially records the death as natural causes.
- Sep 2012Khan's brother and sister petition the Cook County probate court to freeze the lottery cheque; his sister also petitions for guardianship of his 17-year-old daughter. His widow petitions to administer the estate and the court grants it.
- Jan 8, 2013After a relative requests expanded toxicology, the medical examiner revises the finding to lethal cyanide poisoning and the manner of death to homicide.
- Jan 2013Khan's body is exhumed for a full autopsy. Reporting says it yields no decisive new evidence.
- Dec 11, 2013The Cook County probate court approves a settlement. The widow takes one-third of the lottery proceeds, the daughter two-thirds. Neither may bring a wrongful death action unless new evidence emerges or one of them is charged.
- Jul 2017The Chicago Tribune reports the case unsolved five years after the death.
- Aug 2026No one has been charged. The homicide remains open.
What actually went wrong
- No will, with a blended family. A widow and a daughter from a previous relationship is the single most common set-up for an intestate fight in America. Intestacy statutes divide by category, not by relationship, and nobody's expectations survive contact with them.
- A minor beneficiary with no trustee named. Because Khan named no one, a relative petitioned for guardianship of his 17-year-old daughter, and the court had to decide who would control a teenager's share. A testamentary trust would have answered that question in one sentence.
- The prize was claimed in his own name, with no receiving structure. A cheque payable to an individual becomes a probate asset the moment he dies. A cheque payable to a trust does not.
- Standing to interfere. Siblings who take nothing under intestacy when there is a spouse and a child still had enough standing to freeze the estate for months. A funded revocable trust would have removed the asset from the arena entirely.
- The seventeen-month gap. Between death and distribution, an estate cannot pay anyone. Whoever depended on Khan's income depended on nothing for a year and a half.
Would it have gone that way in Florida?
Florida gets further than Illinois did — because §732.802(5) lets the probate judge decide the killing question without waiting for a prosecutor.
Take the two halves separately, because Florida treats them very differently.
The slayer question. Fla. Stat. §732.802 bars a person who unlawfully and intentionally kills or participates in procuring the death of the decedent from taking anything: under the will, by intestacy, by joint-tenancy survivorship (the killing severs the joint interest), as a beneficiary of a bond, life insurance policy, or other contract, and from any other acquisition of property, including a life estate in homestead. The estate passes as though the killer had predeceased.
Subsection (5) is the part that matters in a case like this one. A final judgment of conviction of murder in any degree is conclusive. But in the absence of a conviction, the court may determine, by the greater weight of the evidence, whether the killing was unlawful and intentional. That is the ordinary civil standard — more likely than not — not the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. So a Florida probate court can find that a particular person forfeited their inheritance even where a prosecutor has declined to charge, or where a jury has acquitted. What it cannot do is invent a killer. With no identified person to name, §732.802 has nothing to bite on, and the Florida result on these facts would be the Illinois result.
The distribution question is where Florida diverges sharply. Illinois intestacy gives a spouse and descendants half each. Florida does not. Under §732.102(3), where there are one or more surviving descendants of the decedent who are not lineal descendants of the surviving spouse, the spouse takes one-half of the intestate estate — and under §732.103 the descendants take the other half. A daughter from a previous relationship is exactly that fact pattern.
Layer on the Florida protections that have no Illinois analogue. Homestead under Fla. Const. Art. X, §4 and §732.401 does not pass by the ordinary intestacy rules at all: with a surviving spouse and a descendant who is not the spouse's child, the spouse takes either a life estate with a vested remainder to the descendants, or — by election under §732.401(2) within six months — an undivided one-half interest as tenant in common. §732.402 gives the spouse and children exempt property; §732.403 allows a family allowance of up to $18,000 during administration, which is the statute that would have paid the household bills during those seventeen months. And §732.2035 would give a surviving spouse an elective share of 30% of the elective estate, reaching revocable trusts, POD accounts, and joint property, if she were left less.
The practical instruction is short and it is the same one every case in this archive arrives at. If you have children from a previous relationship, intestacy will not do what you want, and neither will a beneficiary form you filled out years ago. Sign a will and, if there is real money, a funded revocable trust that names the trustee, defines each child's share, and holds a minor's money without a guardianship. If a windfall arrives, direct it into that structure before it is paid, not after.
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Further reading
Third-party sites. Not ours, not endorsed, not kept current by us — just the places worth going next.
Sources
- Wife and daughter of poisoned Ill. lottery winner divide estate — CBS News / AP, Dec 2013
- Urooj Khan update: widow, siblings of poisoned Chicago lottery winner battle over estate — CBS News, Jan 2013
- Urooj Khan, poisoned Chicago lottery winner, had no enemies prior to cyanide death, widow says — CBS News, Jan 2013
- Widow, daughter will split estate of poisoned $1 million lotto winner — NBC News, Dec 2013
- Settlement reached after lottery winner Urooj Khan's death — ABC7, Dec 2013
- Lottery winner's cyanide poisoning death remains unsolved five years later — Chicago Tribune, Jul 2017
- Widow of poisoned Chicago lottery winner Urooj Khan fighting with family over his estate — New York Daily News, Jan 2013
- Fla. Stat. §732.802 — Killer not entitled to receive property or other benefits — The Florida Senate
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Nearly every case in this archive turned on something ordinary — an unwitnessed page, a stale beneficiary line, a document nobody could find. Those are cheap to fix while you're alive and expensive to fix afterward.