A Michigan man was found dead after an apparent boating accident – with a winning lottery ticket tucked inside his pocket.
Gregory Jarvis won $45,000 playing the Club Keno add-on lottery game “The Jack” just weeks before drowning in Caseville, Mich. The 57-year-old winner reportedly had the lottery ticket in his wallet when his body washed up along a private beach in Huron County.
According to reports, Jarvis hadn’t cashed the ticket in because he needed proper documentation. The Michigan Lottery Commission requires winners of prizes of more than $600 to provide photo identification and a physical copy of their social security card in order to collect their winnings.
Jarvis wasn’t able to receive the money straight away because he needed to get his social security card replaced.
So, Jarvis immediately applied for a replacement social security card, but then he disappeared the following week. On Friday, authorities found his corpse washed ashore on a beach in Caseville, along the Saginaw Bay, about ten days after he won the lottery game.
He returned to the venue on Sept. 19 in good spirits and bought rounds of drinks for patrons despite not having cashed in his winning ticket. Blue Water Inn owner Dawn Talaski explained that there was an issue with his social security card, which was why he had not received his money.
It was the last time he was seen alive.
“He couldn’t cash it because he didn’t have a social security card at all, it wasn’t any good, so he applied for a new one,” Talaski said.
“He wasn’t here all week, and we thought, something is wrong,” she said.
Eventually, Jarvis’s boss went looking for him. He went to the Blue Water Inn but wasn’t able to track him down on September 22.
Two days later, a resident on the private beach reported to police that a body had washed up alongside a boat. The boat belonged to Jarvis.
“We are thinking that he was tying up his boat, slipped and fell, hit his head, and that’s where he ended up in the water, no foul play suspected,” Caseville Police Chief Kyle Romzek said.
The winning ticket, however, initially gave police pause.
“It did, at first,” Romzek confirmed, “we were concerned about it but after the autopsy, and we interviewed people at the bar, he was well-liked around here, he was nice guy, that took it off the table.”
Jarvis’s relatives are now in possession of the winning ticket.
Source: AWM