A $12.8 Million Lottery Ticket Is Sitting in a Corporate Safe, A Judge Has Until May 23 to Decide Who Gets It
A Circle K store manager in Scottsdale allegedly clocked out, changed out of his uniform, and bought 25 unsold lottery tickets for $10 the morning after discovering one was a $12.8 million jackpot winner.
On the evening of November 24, 2025, a customer walked into a Circle K in Scottsdale, Arizona, and asked a clerk to replay some previously used lottery numbers for that night’s drawing of The Pick. The clerk printed 85 tickets at a dollar each. The customer paid for 60 and walked out, leaving 25 tickets sitting on the counter.
That night, one of those abandoned tickets matched all six winning numbers. The jackpot was $12.8 million, the fourth-largest prize in The Pick’s history and the largest Arizona lottery jackpot since 2019.
The odds of any single ticket hitting were roughly one in seven million.
Nobody has collected a dollar of it yet, and as of this week, a Maricopa County judge has until May 23 to ensure that somebody can.
What the Store Manager Did and How it Went Down
The following morning, store manager Robert Gawlitza arrived for his shift and learned that a winning ticket had been printed at his location. He located the remaining tickets from the day before and confirmed one was the jackpot winner. He then clocked out, removed his Circle K uniform, and had another employee ring him up for all remaining tickets, including the winning one, for $10. He signed the back of the ticket.
The move was either clever or catastrophically ill-considered, depending on what the court decides. Gawlitza appears to have understood the relevant regulation. Under the Arizona Administrative Code, tickets that are printed but not purchased by a customer become the property of the retailer that printed them. Retailers pay the Arizona Lottery for every ticket they print, whether sold or not. His reasoning, presumably, was that as the store manager, buying unsold store inventory was a legitimate transaction.
Circle K did not see it that way. Management learned what happened, directed that the ticket be held at the company’s corporate offices, where it remains today, and filed a declaratory judgment complaint in the Maricopa County Superior Court seeking a judge’s determination of who legally owns the ticket.
Why This Is More Interesting Than a Typical Lottery Case
Most lottery disputes involve straightforward questions: did the ticket get lost, was the number misread, who among a group of coworkers is entitled to the proceeds of a pooled ticket? This case involves something considerably more philosophically interesting.
Circle K is not simply suing Gawlitza. It is asking the court to determine whether the ticket was validly sold, who lawfully owns it, and who gets the $12.8 million. The Arizona Lottery has also been named a defendant, not because it did anything wrong, but so that it is legally bound by whatever the court decides.
There are at least three distinct parties with a potential claim. Gawlitza signed the back of the ticket and has possession of whatever legal interest that creates. Circle K, as the retailer, holds the ticket physically and can argue that unsold inventory belongs to the corporation, not the manager who bought it from himself after clocking out. And the original customer who abandoned 25 tickets exists somewhere, uncredited and unnamed, having paid for 60 tickets and left 25 others behind, one of which matched all six numbers drawn that evening.
Having 25 unsold tickets sitting around is itself unusual. While some retailers pre-print tickets during big jackpot runs, it is in any retailer’s interest to sell every ticket it prints, since the Arizona Lottery pays them regardless. The accumulation of unsold tickets at a single location, even in a scenario as mundane as a customer ordering more than they paid for, is not a routine occurrence.
The Clock Is Running
The legal novelty of the case is somewhat secondary to its urgency. Under Arizona lottery rules, prizes must be claimed within 180 days of the drawing. For this ticket, the deadline is May 23, 2026. Circle K has filed for a temporary restraining order asking the court to stop the deadline from running while the lawsuit proceeds. A hearing on that request is scheduled for May 15.
If the restraining order is denied and no party successfully claims the ticket by May 23, $12.8 million expires. It simply ceases to exist as a prize. That outcome would be, depending on your perspective, either a remarkable example of a system working exactly as designed or a spectacular waste of money generated by a sequence of events that nobody planned for.
One Phoenix attorney who has been following the case said it will almost certainly become a teaching example in state bar preparation. “This will totally be a question on the State Bar,” he said. “So law students, beware, this case is coming to you.”
What Comes Next
The legal questions the court has to answer are genuinely unsettled. The retailer-ownership rule in Arizona’s administrative code seems to support Circle K’s claim that the corporation, not Gawlitza, owned the unsold tickets. But Gawlitza’s purchase, even at $10 for 25 tickets, created a transaction with a receipt. Whether clocking out and changing out of a uniform converts a store manager into a regular customer, and whether that conversion can lawfully be achieved in the time it takes to walk from the back office to the front counter, is a question Arizona courts have never had to answer.
Lottery commissions and retailers across the country will be watching the outcome. Whatever the court decides could shape how these disputes are handled going forward, and whether clocking out and buying a winning ticket off the counter is a loophole or a dead end.
Gawlitza has not commented publicly. The winning ticket is in a safe at Circle K’s corporate offices. The judge has until May 23.
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