LOTTO GUY SLAIN
Two-time winner in Bx. stab
A two-time lottery winner was stabbed to death inside his Bronx apartment, police and relatives said.
Owen Dillard, 73, a father of two whose good fortune netted him $60,000 this year, was discovered by his fiancée on Monday at about 8:30 p.m. in their apartment on Beekman Avenue in Mott Haven, cops said.
His body was lying on the living-room floor with several stab wounds to the left side of the neck, police said.
Dillard’s fiancée, 60, told authorities she left the third-floor apartment that day at about 8:30 a.m. and returned 12 hours later to find Dillard’s body, according to cops. There were no signs of forced entry.
She called 911, but Dillard could not be saved. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police interviewed the fiancée but did not take her into custody, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
Cops say they have identified a person of interest in connec- tion with the slaying through building surveillance footage. That person is believed to be known to Dillard, law-enforcement sources said.
Dillard had won a $10,000 Lotto drawing in April, and about six months ago he scored a prize of $50,000 from the Win-4 game, his nephew said.
“My uncle was a sharing man, a giving man. He plays the lottery, gambles,” Dillard’s nephew Shabazz Muhaymin, 50, said Tuesday. “A lot of people in this neighborhood know him. The neighborhood is now broken without him.”
Dillard’s ex-wife, Yolanda Jor- dan, 61, who lives on the same floor where Dillard lived, said through tears: “He was a good man. I’m just trying to wrap my mind around this. He’s been here forever.”
Jordan, who said Dillard raised her two sons and was with him for 30 years, noted that he was a “chef by trade.”
“He was a good dad and he will be missed very much,” said the devastated woman, noting Dillard had recently fallen ill.
“He had a number of things [wrong] — heart, liver. You know? Just trying to make it from one day to the next,” said Jordan, who added that recently doctors told Dillard he had three years to live.
Building resident Angela Callazo, 29, said that when Dillard won the Lotto in April “it was like the big announcement.”
She added that Dillard acted as a money lender to people.
“He helped out,” Callazo said. “If you needed the money, he’d give it to you, but then you’d go back and pay back the interest.
José Sin, 43, an employee of a nearby grocery store, called Dillard “a beautiful man.”
“A customer, a father, a grandfather — listen, he was everything,” Sin said.