A Chicago Streeterville man murdered his wife, Sania Khan after she placed a video on Tik Tok about divorce.
29-year-old woman, Sania Khan, a Pakistani American photographer recently moved to Chicago, June of 2021.
Her ex-husband allegedly murdered her during a murder-suicide on Monday in Chicago. She previously spoke about her divorce as well as her healing journey on social media, according to police, ABC News reported.
Khan’s ex-husband, 36-year-old Raheel Ahmed, traveled from his home in Alpharetta, Georgia — a suburb of Atlanta – to Khan’s residence in Chicago.
Chicago police told ABC News in a statement that officers arrived on Monday afternoon at the 200 block of E. Ohio street. They found a woman and a man with gunshot wounds to their heads inside a residence.
They pronounced her dead on the scene. However, they transported her ex-husband to Northwestern Hospital. But he passed there. Officials recovered a weapon from the scene, the police stated.
Chicago Streeterville Police never named the individuals. However, the Cook County Coroner’s office confirmed to ABC News their identities as Sania Khan and Raheel Ahmed. They stated Khan’s death as ra homicide, but Ahmed’s death as a suicide.
Due to family members reporting Ahmed missing, Chicago Streeterville Police performed a welfare check at Khan’s condo. The tip came to them from Alpharetta police.
According to Khan’s own posts on TikTok, under the username “geminigirl_099,” her marriage lasted less than a year before she filed for divorce.
Khan, a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, talked about her marital struggles on TikTok. She shared her journey to finding empowerment through divorce and starting a new life.
She urged women to “stop ignoring those red flags” and shared her struggles with her own family. But some in the South Asian community, did not support her decision to get a divorce.
“Going through a divorce as a South Asian Woman feels like you failed at life sometimes,” she wrote in a TikTok video. “The way the community labels you, the lack of emotional support you receive, and the pressure to stay with someone because ‘what will people say’ is isolating. It makes it harder for women to leave marriages that they shouldn’t have been in to begin with.”
Women are always expected to stay silent,” she wrote. “It’s what keeps us in messed up situations in the first place. I’m done with this mentality.”
And in a video on the eve of her 29th birthday, Khan showed off her first tattoo – “XXVIII” which is 28 in Roman numerals. She wrote that being 28 was the year that “changed f—- everything.”
“The year I got married, the year I moved from a small town to one of the largest cities in the country, the year I filed for divorce, the year I almost died.”
A GoFundMe account set up to help her family with her funeral expenses received more than $35,000 in donations by Friday afternoon.
According to a study by the World Health Organization, instances of domestic violence increased globally during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sadly, domestic homicides occur too often.
Actress Christina Milian previously launched an app called Stop Attack in effort to support women escaping domestic violence.
According to NCADV, 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline urges anyone in or knowing someone in need of help to call 1-800-799-7233.
