A man from Michigan, USA died without cashing the $45,000 lottery ticket he was carrying in his wallet.
According to an ABC News report, Gregory Jarvis bought the winning ticket at the Blue Water Inn, where he was a regular, on Sept. 13. He’d been carrying it in his wallet while waiting for a new social security card, which is needed to collect a Club Keno jackpot .
On Friday, September 24, the 57-year-old’s body was found on a private beach on Saginaw Bay. A coroner has determined Jarvis drowned.
Reports say Jarvis applied for a new social security card after finding he was unable to collect his winnings, but it still hadn’t arrived in the mail.
Days after Jarvis’ last visit to Blue Water Inn, his boss came to the bar to say the big winner hadn’t shown up for work.
Blue Water Inn owner Dawn Talaski described the briefly lucky winner as a “very nice guy” who visited the establishment almost daily.
She told ABC that Jarvis was buying drinks to celebrate with people on Sept. 19, even though he still hadn’t managed to redeem his winning ticket.
She says that was the last time she saw him.
“Sometimes he’s up north working,” Talaski said. “He wasn’t here all week and we thought, something is wrong.”
Talaski said Jarvis had planned to use some of his winnings to visit his sister and father in North Carolina
Caseville Police Chief Kyle Romzek says investigators believe Jarvis slipped and fell while tying up his boat and hit his head before winding up in the water. When cops found the winning ticket, they decided to take another look at Jarvis’ cause of death, but found no evidence of foul play.
“At first we were concerned about it,“ Romzek said. “But after the autopsy, and we interviewed people at the bar, he was well-liked around here, he was a nice guy, that took it off the table.”
The winning ticket has been given to his family.?????
