Patrick Yazzie is a millionaire; the only small and very little detail was that he did not know he was a millionaire.  And as funny as it sounds this is a true story.  Patrick Yazzie won the lottery and he did not even know!    You see Patrick plays the lottery quite regularly and somehow he had a couple of tickets stashed somewhere and he had forgotten all about them. Powerball lottery

Patrick had originally bought a Powerball ticket for the March 31st, 2012 draw. The ticket matched the first five numbers which made him eligible to receive the $1 million second-tier prize.  But he didn’t know that he had won because he had not checked his ticket. The ticket just sat there, collecting dust in his home, unchecked and running the risk of ending up in the garbage or even in the laundry.

Luckily around May the 15th Patrick’s wife, Sharon was somehow organizing stuff and cleaning up when she suddenly found some old lottery tickets lying around the house so she picked them all up and set to the task to have them check.  That’s when she discovered the $1 million win from the March 31st Powerball ticket. Luckily nothing happened to the ticket and she was able to find it, check it and claim it.  Their excitement and happiness was simply so genuine that they could not help it and they could not keep the good news for themselves.  So Patrick decided to call his sister and because of all the excitement the only thing he could say when she answered the phone was:
“You’re talking to a millionaire!”

We have ran a series of notes on people who had no idea that they had won the lottery and who luckily they discovered that they did just in time to claim it.  These stories are a reminder that many times there are prizes that go unclaimed and tickets that get lost simply because the player did not check them did not keep them in a proper place and did not sign them at the back.