Circle K Clerk Says He’s Not Wrong For Cashing $12.8 Million Abandoned Lottery Ticket

Robert Gawlitza worked at Circle K for 20 years. Now he's at the center of a lawsuit over $12.8 million and a stack of lottery tickets a customer forgot to take with them.

Here's what happened. On November 24, 2025, a customer at a Circle K in Arizona bought tickets for "The Pick" lottery game — a game where players match six numbers to win. The customer paid for $60 worth of tickets but $85 worth had been printed, leaving $25 worth of tickets sitting unclaimed on the counter. Those tickets stayed there overnight. The winning numbers were called. The abandoned tickets hit.

Gawlitza, who was working that day, clocked out and purchased the abandoned tickets from another store employee. His attorney says he called his district manager first to confirm he was allowed to buy them, and that store policy actually requires employees to purchase any leftover lottery tickets that go unsold.

Then in January, Circle K management contacted him and fired him — someone who had worked there for two decades — for allegedly violating that same policy.

"My client, he wanted to do the right thing," attorney Josh Kolsrud told reporters. "He tried to follow all the policies, letter for letter, word for word, and he got fired for it."

Circle K filed a complaint against Gawlitza in February. The company framed it not as a lawsuit targeting him specifically but as a request for the court to weigh in on who rightfully owns the ticket. "It is a declaratory judgment complaint filed to seek clarity from the court to determine rightful ownership of this lottery ticket," the company said in a statement.

The Arizona Lottery is holding the $12.8 million until the case is resolved.

The Legal Question Nobody Has a Clean Answer To

This case sits at the intersection of several genuinely unresolved legal questions about abandoned property, lottery rules, and employer-employee relationships.

When a customer walks away from a printed lottery ticket without paying for it, the question of ownership becomes murky. The customer didn't pay for those specific tickets. The store didn't technically sell them. And the employee who bought them followed what his attorney says was established industry practice for handling unsold printed tickets.

Arizona lottery regulations generally require that winning tickets be presented by the rightful owner — but defining "rightful owner" when a ticket was abandoned, purchased by an employee under a supervisor-approved process, and then won a jackpot the size of a small fortune is exactly the kind of question courts exist to sort out.

The original customer hasn't been publicly identified and it's unclear whether they've come forward to claim the ticket. If they do, that adds another layer — did they abandon the tickets by walking away without paying, or do they have a claim to winnings from tickets they didn't intend to leave behind? The answer isn't obvious.

What Actually Tends to Happen in These Cases

Lottery disputes over unclaimed or abandoned tickets are more common than most people realize. Courts have ruled in different directions depending on jurisdiction and circumstances.

In some cases, courts have found that a customer who walks away from a purchased ticket has abandoned it and forfeits any claim to winnings. In others, courts have ruled that the circumstances of abandonment matter — whether the customer knowingly left the ticket or simply forgot it. The fact that these tickets were never fully paid for adds another dimension that distinguishes this case from a simple forgotten-ticket scenario.

Gawlitza's lawyer says his client's primary goal now isn't even the money — it's clearing his name. "He loved his job, he would love to go back," Kolsrud said. That option appears to be off the table regardless of how the legal case resolves.

Twenty years at the same company, a supervisor's approval, a coworker who rang up the transaction, and still — fired, sued, and waiting on a court to decide whether following policy was actually a crime.

The $12.8 million sits in an Arizona Lottery account while everyone figures it out.

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