A Michigan man died without cashing the $45,000 lottery ticket he was carrying in his wallet.
ABC News reported Gregory Jarvis bought that 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 in the Wolverine State.
The 57-year-old’s body was found Friday on a private beach on Saginaw Bay. A coroner reportedly determined Jarvis had drowned.
Jarvis is said to have 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. Blue Water Inn owner Dawn Talaski described the briefly lucky winner as a “very nice guy” who visited the Caseville, Mich., establishment almost daily. She told ABC that Jarvis was buying celebratory drinks for patrons on Sept. 19, even though he still hadn’t managed to redeem his winning ticket. It 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.”
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. Caseville Police Chief Kyle Romzek said that 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 confessed. “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.”
Talaski said Jarvis had planned to use some of his winnings to visit his sister and father in North Carolina. His family now has the winning ticket.
