For about an hour on Thursday, March 11, an unsigned Tennessee Cash ticket worth $1,178,746 lay in the parking lot of the O’Reilly’s Auto Parts store in Sparta.
The day before, Sparta native Nick Slatten had finished his day laying tile in Smithville and stopped at Village Market to buy a drink and a Tennessee Cash ticket for that night’s drawing before heading home.
On Thursday morning Mr.
Slatten checked the Tennessee Lottery app for the Wednesday evening Tennessee Cash drawing results. Ticket in hand, he noticed he had hit two numbers, and then he looked again. He had them all, making his ticket worth $1,178,746.
“I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it,” Mr. Slatten said. “I can’t express it. It was something else.”
Mr. Slatten rushed to his fiancée Michelle’s work in Sparta to tell her about the good fortune. After sharing the news, he continued to run errands, which included taking his brother to buy a car part at O’Reilly’s and then a stop for lunch.
It was about an hour later, Mr. Slatten said, when he realized he didn’t have the ticket anymore. “I couldn’t find it anywhere,” he said.
It should be noted that lottery tickets are bearer instruments, just like cash. If a player loses his ticket, anyone can claim it. Lottery officials encourage players to sign their ticket immediately after purchase to identify it as theirs and to help prevent someone else from cashing it, in the event that it is lost or stolen.
Mr. Slatten immediately began retracing his steps and pulled into the O’Reilly’s parking lot where he saw it lying on the ground, right next to the driver’s side door of another vehicle. “It’s a million-dollar ticket, and someone stepped right over it,” he said.
Mr. Slatten’s ticket is one of five tickets worth $1 million or more sold in Tennessee this month and the 310th ticket sold worth $1 million or more since the Lottery began on January 20, 2004.
Mr. Slatten and his fiancée will continue working and have plans to buy a house of their own and better vehicles as well as investing. Mainly, their plan is to live life with “not a whole lot of worries,” he said.