Urooj Khan — the $1 Million Scratch-Off Winner Poisoned the Next Day
Summary
Urooj Khan was a 46-year-old Chicago dry-cleaning businessman, an immigrant from India who ran Style Dry Cleaners on Devon Avenue on the city's North Side. In the summer of 2012 he bought two $30 instant scratch-off tickets at a neighborhood 7-Eleven and one of them won $1 million on the Illinois Lottery — a stroke of luck made stranger by reports that he had recently sworn off gambling. He chose the single lump-sum payment, which after federal and state withholding came to roughly $424,000. The Illinois Lottery issued the check on July 19, 2012. The next day, Khan was dead.
He became violently ill at home overnight after a family dinner and was pronounced dead on July 20, 2012. The Cook County Medical Examiner's office, finding no signs of trauma or foul play, initially certified the death as natural — attributing it to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease on the basis of an external examination rather than a full autopsy. That ruling stood only briefly. Khan's brother, Imtiaz Khan, refused to accept that an apparently healthy man had died overnight and petitioned the medical examiner to look again.
When investigators retested preserved fluid samples, the final toxicology results in late November 2012 showed a lethal level of cyanide in Khan's blood. The manner of death was reclassified as homicide, and in January 2013 his body was exhumed for a full autopsy to determine how the poison had been administered. By then the remains were too decomposed to retain cyanide, and the autopsy yielded no further clues — but the medical examiner, Dr. Stephen Cina, stood by the homicide ruling based on the original blood samples.
More than a decade later, the case remains open and unsolved. No one has ever been charged in connection with Urooj Khan's death, and family members who were investigated have denied any involvement. Cursed Jackpot reports only what the medical examiner and investigators established — a death by cyanide poisoning, reclassified as a homicide — and makes no accusation against any living person. What is certain is the chilling sequence at the center of the file: a $1 million ticket, a check issued, and a man dead before he could spend a dollar of it.
Timeline
The Win
Urooj Khan, 46, ran Style Dry Cleaners on Devon Avenue, the kind of hands-on immigrant enterprise that turns long hours into a foothold; he had opened the business in 2004 and also held real estate. By the accounts that surfaced after his death he had once been a habitual lottery player and had given it up, only to buy two $30 instant tickets at a neighborhood 7-Eleven during a routine errand in the summer of 2012. One of them was a $1 million Illinois Lottery scratch-off winner.
Khan was, by the descriptions of those who knew him, delighted in a grounded way. He spoke of paying down debt, of putting money toward his young daughter's future, and of giving to a children's hospital. The Illinois Lottery photographed him with the oversized novelty check — the standard ritual that also makes a winner's identity and good fortune a matter of public record.
Offered the choice between a long stream of annual payments and a single discounted cash payment, Khan took the lump sum. After the mandatory federal and state tax withholding, the net came to roughly $424,000 — a life-changing sum for a small-business family, and a figure that would, within days, be cited in every news account not for what it bought but for how quickly its recipient died.
The Spending
There was, in the end, no spending — and that absence is the whole horror of the case. The lottery issued Khan's check on July 19, 2012, and the next day he was dead. Whatever plans he had described for the money — the debt, his daughter's future, the charitable gift — none of them came to pass. The fortune existed in his name for barely a day.
In place of a spending spree, the record holds only the ordinary domestic detail that investigators would later scrutinize: a family dinner at home, after which Khan became violently ill overnight and collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead on July 20, 2012. To anyone outside the room it looked like a sudden cardiac event in a middle-aged man — unremarkable enough that the first official ruling, based on an external exam, was death by natural causes from arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
That is the grim distinction of the Khan file within this catalogue. Most 'cursed jackpot' cases trace a winner's slow destruction through what they did with the money — the casinos, the lawsuits, the hangers-on. Khan did none of it. The money simply made him, for one day, worth more dead than alive, and the windfall functioned not as a temptation he failed but as an apparent motive someone else — never identified — appears to have acted upon.
The Unraveling
The unraveling of the official story began with a relative's refusal to accept it. Khan's brother, Imtiaz Khan, pressed the Cook County Medical Examiner's office to examine the death more closely, and the office agreed to retest preserved fluid samples for poisons. When the final toxicology results came back in late November 2012, they revealed a lethal level of cyanide in Khan's blood. In December the manner of death was reclassified from natural causes to homicide.
To establish how the cyanide had been delivered and rule out other possibilities, prosecutors successfully petitioned to exhume Khan's body, and on January 18, 2013 his remains were disinterred for a complete autopsy — a step that drew reporters to a suburban Chicago cemetery and pushed the case onto front pages and international wires. But the body was badly decomposed, cyanide has a short half-life, and the autopsy detected none in the remaining tissue, leaving investigators unable to determine how the dose entered his body. Dr. Stephen Cina, the medical examiner, nonetheless maintained the homicide ruling based on the original post-death blood samples.
The investigation never produced an arrest. There were probate disputes over Khan's estate and the disposition of the winnings — ultimately settled, with his widow, Shabana Ansari, and his young daughter, Jasmeen, dividing the prize and the property — and there was intense public speculation, but speculation is not evidence and the case did not move to charges. More than a decade on, the death of Urooj Khan remains classified as a homicide and remains unsolved. Cursed Jackpot states this plainly: no person has been charged, the matter is open, and nothing here should be read as an accusation against any individual.
What Went Wrong
After
The criminal case has gone cold. As of the mid-2020s no one has been charged in the death of Urooj Khan, and the Cook County Medical Examiner's classification of homicide by cyanide poisoning stands as the last official word. The exhumation that was meant to crack the case instead closed off a line of evidence, because the decomposed remains no longer held the poison. Investigators have said over the years that the case remains open; barring new evidence or a new witness, it sits among Chicago's unresolved killings.
What endured publicly was litigation and legend rather than a verdict. Khan's estate and the lottery prize were fought over in probate before a settlement divided them between his widow and his daughter, and his death has been retold endlessly in true-crime coverage, podcasts, and documentary segments — almost always reduced to a single grim hook, the man poisoned the day after his check was cut. That framing is accurate as far as it goes, but it can flatten a real person into a plot device.
Cursed Jackpot keeps the file because it is the starkest illustration of a single mechanism: a windfall can endanger a winner not by tempting him into ruin but by making him valuable to someone else. Khan never gambled the money away, never sued or was sued, never lost his discipline. He simply won, and within a day he was dead. We report the established facts, name no suspect, and leave the question the courts never answered exactly where it stands — open.
Lessons
- A sudden, publicized fortune can endanger a winner by making them more valuable to others than they are alive.
- Cyanide and similar poisons can mimic natural death and go undetected unless someone specifically requests toxicology testing.
- A homicide can be missed entirely without a family member willing to challenge the first official ruling.
- For a sudden-fortune winner, the most dangerous exposure may come from inside the trusted household, not from strangers.
- Winnings left unspent at a winner's death become a contested prize that can distort everyone around the estate.