Rabbitholed #39: Sania Khan Bravely Chronicled Leaving Her Abusive Husband—Up Until He Drove 11 Hours to Murder Her Inside Her High-Rise Chicago Apartment
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Rabbitholed #39: Sania Khan Bravely Chronicled Leaving Her Abusive Husband—Up Until He Drove 11 Hours to Murder Her Inside Her High-Rise Chicago Apartment
You won't be able to forget this story, and I don't want you to.
This post is free. If you’re a journalist, would you please consider covering it? Sania Khan deserved so much more. She deserves to be remembered.
Today’s Rabbithole:
Twenty-nine-year-old professional photographer Sania Khan briefly married a man in 2021 she had been with for six years prior in a big pandemic-respite-themed wedding affair in Atlanta. Not long after that union, though, Sania’s TikTok chronicled her leaving him as well as the extreme social pressure and estrangement she felt because of strong patriarchal South Asian cultural norms to stay married. Before too long though, she started chronicling her complete joy at starting again and “manifesting” a brand new life.
She had done it. She got divorced! She was surviving! No one could break her—not even her family’s disapproval.
Indeed, her TikTok clocks a whirling dervish of stubborn female independent sparkling energetic joy, all while gloriously cheering herself and everyone around her on, too. You can watch and read and see her get stronger, psyching herself up, being more and more unafraid to tackle…whatever! Anything! On TikTok, she legacied herself:
“POV: You were with a boy for 6 years that made you feel like a 4 and when you break up you realize you were a 10 this whole time” (with her scrolling through photoshoot stills of herself looking radiant, laughing and happy). The caption reads: “He had me really doubting myself #breakup.” (5/25/22)
“Bestie, stop ignoring those red flags. They’re the same reason you leave him later. It’s much less painful in the beginning than 6 years in…” (5/29/22)
“When you get married and it didn’t even last a year” (5/30/22)
“POV: you’re the black sheep of your Southasian family” (6/2/22)
“When someone shows your Southasian mom your TikTok where you’re openly talking about your business and wearing clothes she wouldn’t approve of. You’re almost 30 but still scared of her. It’s the reason you grew up living a double life. But now it’s more important to be true to yourself.” (6/2/22)
“You think you can hurt me? My family members told me if I left my husband I would be letting Shaytan “win,” that I dress like a prostitute and if I move back to my hometown they’ll kill themselves.” (6/6/22)
Sania’s infectious energy just intoxicates. She is chaotic joyful uncontainable life itself.
And on Monday evening, her ex-husband put an end to all of that.
According to police, 36-year-old Alpharetta resident Raheel Ahmed got in a car and traveled from Georgia to arrive at her apartment in Streeterville, Chicago, in the early evening. When police knocked on her apartment door at 4:30p.m., they heard a gunshot and groan.
Inside, they found Ahmed dying of the lethal wound he inflicted upon himself.
Lying near the front door, Sania had already been shot dead.
Why You Should Care:
There’s an epidemic of violence against women committed by men who know them and are closest to them. We need to normalize such violence being considered the most weak, cowardly, pathetic, inexcusable, unrecoverable actions that men can take. But that doesn’t have any effect on someone who is mentally ill and beyond the scope of reaching, so let’s normalize women employing the gift of fear to try to keep more of them alive. And let’s celebrate and remember this truly extraordinary woman.
She deserved everything.
Sania Fought For Her Life Like a Warrior for Joy
When Sania Khan’s marriage turned toxic, she decided: I’m not going out like that.
You can read Sania’s exchanges online with a young woman who hired her recently for upcoming wedding photography. (And of course Sania’s TikTok is filled with more value-filled photography tips than many full-fledged photography books even contain. Some people just can’t help but spill value and gold wherever they go. They are the most special.) The light in Sania’s writing just absolutely shines through in her response to the bride signing the contract to hire her for work. “I CAN’T WAIT!!!!!” Sania wrote.
And when you watch her TikToks, despite there being practically Emily in Paris levels of I’m doing it fun and frolic everywhere she goes, none of it ever feels frivolous. It feels like she is saving her life, doing the hardest work that you can do of moving on—especially when you are going up against a cultural norm in your community and being told that the worst thing you can do is get divorced or do anything that might raise the eyebrows in an extremely judgmental and patriarchal social or familial circle—and still, just, bravely chronicling your existence in spite of all of it.
She was told everything she couldn’t do—don’t talk about it, don’t talk about being told not to talk about it—and she refused to comply.
Sania knew who was in control of her life: She was.
The Legacy of Sania Khan
Her final TikTok was on June 21, 2022. “My best friend is a bride!!” Sania wrote, featuring her friend putting her hand into the camera lens, then pulling out to reveal the friend wearing a stunning white flowing wedding dress. The day before on TikTok, Sania showed off her own transformation from jeans-shorts casual into a stunning floor-length, form-fitting long crushed velvet red bridesmaid’s dress.
At the very top of the Sania’s handle on TikTok—@geminigirl_099—it reads “South Asian” with a picture of the Pakistan and American flag. Underneath that it reads “going through a divorce/healing” and below that “photographer.”
She has three pinned TikToks.
In the first video on June 1, 2022, using the moody Madeline the Person song-sound of “Mean” (“One thing I like about me is that I'm nothing like you and I never will be…”) Sania turns the camera on to capture a few seconds of her mentally fatigued face, running her hands through her hair before exhaling and shaking her head in front of a white-bricked wall.
The words on the video read: “Southasian culture is so mentally draining. Sitting in a coffeeshop getting lectured by family members after my TikTok went viral. Women are always expected to stay silent. It’s what keeps us in messed up situation in the first place. I’m done with this mentality.”
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Pinned as a comment at the top is something @smilewithashhh wrote: “Honestly, just keep Allah near you in your heart and bismillah before everything. These videos could be the answers to so many women’s duas.” (Bismallah means “we start our action seeking help and blessings through the name of Allah.” Dua is a “prayer of invocation, supplication or request, even asking help or assistance from God.”)
Sania responded: “Wow. I never even thought of it like that. Thank you SO MUCH. I needed to hear this.”
The second pinned TikTok was uploaded a day before on May 31, 2022. She uses a snippet of Kendrick Lamar’s “Unite in Grief”—“I’ve been going through something, 1855 days”—and has uploaded a video of her wearing a light blue dress, momentarily feeling herself: running her fingers through her hair, posing, primping, feeling cute and resting her chin on her hand.
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The text reads: “To my Southasian queens, a reminder that you don’t have to settle in marriage or love. The person you marry is the person you sleep next to every single night. Please don’t take that lightly. Sleeping next to you is a HONOR. Is that man TRULY deserving of you or does he just look good on paper?”
The third pinned TikTok features her adorned in traditional wedding garb, stunning in ornately dazzling gold and bold red, hennaed hands and deep scarlet lipstick, sitting on the ground of a rose-petal-covered suite. A line from the Suki Waterhouse song “Good Looking” plays. The full lyrics read: “Tides thrash inside/ Baby, I’m high octane/ Fever in a shock wave/ My core vibrates in an opium haze/ yet you think we’re the same.” It’s that final line that plays on repeat: “Yet you think we’re the same.”
The lyrics read “Finally had your dream Southasian wedding but end up marrying just another toxic Southasian man.”
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Before long, Sania’s TikTok might well be scrubbed as those involved in crimes often have social media locked down, but it does exist now—and it’s a documentary about the life Sania should have gone onto lead.
Instead, she is a headline and a statistic and a tragedy that words can’t quite do justice to no matter how many are used.
Trying to figure out what happened exactly are those who actually knew her.
In the subReddit “ABCDesis” under a post called “Just want to hold space for discussion on the murder of Sania Khan,” a user by the name of SunburstStreet explains to another commenter why her ex may have been familiar with her Streeterville address, explaining, “From one of her TikTok videos, she said that she almost lost her life at the beginning of the year in their apartment. She may have still been living in that same apartment.”
Even more shocking, user Appropriate_Day993 writes that she was good friends with Sania, and says, “Her husband tried to kill her before after having a psychotic break. He is mentally ill and is bipolar. He tried to jump off a building with her. This is what triggered the start of the divorce. Her mom and his mom tried to force her to stay married. I don’t know if he was charged at this point.”
I reached out to this user to further confirm, but did not hear back. Obviously, all of this is alleged.
If you read through Sania’s TikTok entries, that would check out as she makes reference to almost losing her life and the height of her building. Like how so many young people use TikTok, a wealth of information is contained in a few flickering seconds, but it’s all there, scream-whispered as a documentation of what happened to her.
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Tragically, the same glory that propelled Sania forward must have clearly enraged her ex-husband.
He knew who was in charge of her life, too.
And he couldn’t stand that.
So he drove hours 11 hours from Georgia to Chicago. He went to her door, and when she opened it, he shot her dead. When the police were on their way, he shot himself right before they entered and died shortly later in the hospital.
He died as he lived. Forgettable. Weak. Not a man. An evil coward.
Hell is too good for him.
Top 3 Rabbitholed Takeaways:
#1 Sania Khan was screaming for you to know who she was, what she wanted, what she dreamed about and what she was going through.
Her TikToks tell the story of resilience and renewal:
“POV: you live in Chicago, it’s finally sunny outside, the weather it’s warmer and you’re one step closer to hott girl summer” (showing the gorgeous tulips in downtown) (5/23/22)
“The sadness that comes with the realization that you spent years of your life with someone but never truly knew them” (with Sania staring out the window of what looks to be a Streeterville apartment) with the caption “You start to doubt everything #divorcejourney #newlydivorced) (5/23/22)
“No one tells you how hard it is to lose your best friend, your love and the future you dreamed of together when you go through a divorce” (with video of her crying) and the caption “It gets better, I promise #divorce #healing #divorcejourney” (5/23/22)
“A reminder for my heart broken queens: pour that love you wanted from him into yourself. You’ll thank yourself later” (with her wearing a white dress and admiring herself in the mirror) (5/24/22)
“My last day as a 28-year-old. 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, and my apartment is on the 28th floor. Which if you know my story is the one I almost lost my life in. It’s the year that changed fucking everything. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up as a 29-year-old. Here’s to new beginnings. I’m so happy” (6/13/22)
Please.
Know who she was.
Because Sania Khan was just extraordinary.
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#2 It may sound anti-modern-empowerment-narrative to say so, but when an ex is dangerous and has tried to hurt you in the past, please consider disappearing yourself for your own safety.
In reading news reports of Sania’s death, I was trying to find this one Facebook post by a friend who wrote about how Sania was killed despite her doing “everything right.”
Googling the wording of this woman’s post led me to a 2005 New York Times article called “When an Order of Protection Does Not Work.” It’s extreme, and runs very contrary to the empowerment narrative that tells you to do you to find yourself again. But if what Sania’s friends have posted about her ex is at all true, I hope you will let Sania’s legacy guide you and your loved ones to safety if you are ever even remotely in a situation with a dangerous and obsessive person who seemingly won’t let you go. The article states in the case of this other woman who also “did everything right”:
Law enforcement officers and advocates said there was one more thing Ms. Port-Louis could have done: disappear. She could have packed up her daughter, quit college, said goodbye forever to her friends and family, changed her identity and moved far away.
But very few victims of abuse, even those who are certain that their former partners are capable of murder, are willing to consider so drastic a step. Experts said that practical concerns—the loss of a job, the expense of moving, the effect on children—almost always outweigh fear.
"They say they want to be near their families and don't want to have to start all over again," said Jo Anne Sanders, the executive director of the Suffolk County Coalition Against Domestic Violence. "But some women tell us: 'I know someday he's going to kill me. It's just a matter of time."'
Still, a small but growing number of victims find that anonymous relocation, as it is known, is their only choice.
#3 Do whatever you can to stay alive.
To be clear—forever and in perpetuity—Sania Khan didn’t do a single thing wrong. Nothing.
Sania was fearless, and it makes her impossibly lovable and wise and inspiring, but I also wish, as I’m sure many women do, we could have kept her safe from the psychopath who murdered her.
Based on everything I’ve read, his mental illness and desire for revenge born of a demented sense of what he felt to be unrecoverable personal humiliation made him nothing short of a ticking time bomb. He was unwilling to let her move on, and that made him extremely dangerous.
Dangerous, sick people can’t be reasoned with, and they certainly can’t be kept away or told there is a stopping point via restraining orders which she apparently had, according to her friends’ reports. This level of danger can never, ever be under-appreciated. If someone has nothing to lose, if they think their life is essentially over because of distorted, irrational thinking, they’ve become not just scary but potentially deadly. Again: They have nothing to lose. Their rational is not one of reason.
Of course, I want to see our sons change, too. I want to see mental health care reformed. I want women to be able to say or do anything they want when they are in an impossible situation.
But more than anything, I want women to stay alive. So just think about that, and take that in for your own protection and that of those you love.
What do I mean by that?
I mean:
Be paranoid. Annoy the police. Annoy your friends and family. Bring shame to your family. Refuse to talk. Don’t open the door. Make people call you crazy. Create a scene. Be loud. Be embarrassing. Stay alive.
Sania did her best. That much is clear.
While I’m lucky that I have never experienced this personally, working as a police reporter I have met victims who have experienced this insidious domestic violence danger time and again, and this is what I want to say:
Humiliated, mentally ill men who think they have nothing to lose are as fatal as cancer. They track you. They stalk you. They think that even a rejection is a sign. And if someone tries to kill you once, regard them as an active threat.
Of course you should not have to live your life cowing in fear of them, but at the same time, having seen far too many instances of deadly despicable men who lash out at exes—the peak of sickness in society and in an individual—please, for safety’s sake, regard these men’s continued existence in the world the way that you might regard a deranged sniper with sights set upon you.
No contact, and don’t share anything about your life online. Yes, this is completely unfair and it runs counter to every other “live your own authentic life” narrative out there right now, but I say this because I think that young people who are coming into their own as individuals in the world today sometimes think that maybe there is no identity beyond social media validation.
There is. There is so much more beyond social media.
Truly, Sania gave us such a giant gift in her posts, and in her life, and what do I know, maybe in the end this psychopath could not have been stopped no matter what.
But if I had any power to protect her, I would have told her to go dark and to capture all of her glory privately to be shared later when she knew she was safe from this cowardly deranged man.
So I’m telling you instead.
Do not be nice. Do not hear someone out. Do not let your boundaries down when someone has already shown you who they are.
Death by the hands of someone you know or love is so common at this point as to be a public health epidemic for women. One of the most critical things we can do is instill in our daughters a sense of fear that will potentially save their lives some day.
If it keeps you alive—be less brave.
Rabbitholed #39: Sania Khan Bravely Chronicled Leaving Her Abusive Husband—Up Until He Drove 11 Hours to Murder Her Inside Her High-Rise Chicago Apartment
Every word of this is so important