Fired Scottsdale Circle K manager gives his side of ongoing $12.8M lottery ticket dispute

A former Scottsdale Circle K manager who bought a disputed $12.8 million lottery ticket and was later fired because of it doesn’t think he did anything wrong.

Robert Gawlitza and his attorney told KTAR News 92.3 FM on Monday that he was just following company policy when he purchased the jackpot The Pick ticket from the Nov. 25, 2025, drawing.

“It’s something that you almost see in a movie given the facts of the case. It certainly seems like it could be a documentary on Netflix — hopefully with a happy ending,” attorney Josh Kolsrud said.

Background on Scottsdale Circle K lottery ticket dispute

The day of the drawing, a woman came into the Circle K where Gawlitza worked at the southeast corner of 56th Street and Bell Road and ordered $85 worth of lottery tickets. But after the clerk printed them out, the customer realized she only had $60 in her purse. The clerk left the additional tickets by the register for anybody else to buy, but nobody did.

When Gawlitza came in to work the next day, his duties included settling the previous day’s accounts.

“He found out that there were extra lottery tickets that had not gone sold. And he also discovered that one of the tickets was the winner for the lottery that happened the night before,” Kolsrud said.

Gawlitza then texted his district manager and asked if the store policy for when an employee wanted to buy leftover lottery tickets was to clock out, buy them and clock back in. When his supervisor said yes, he took those steps to buy the unused tickets.

Gawlitza said he wasn’t trying to bend the rules, describing the purchase of tickets that were printed by mistake as a “typical transaction” at the store. But the situation soon became far from typical.

“It was only later that the … manager said that, ‘Well, hold on a second, you know, basically, that’s a lot of money, so … I’m basically going back on everything that I said about what I told you and we want the ticket, OK, give us the ticket,’” Kolsrud said.

Gawlitza agreed to give Circle K the ticket to hold until the ownership issue could be resolved.

“So, the next two months Circle K told Robert that he had done nothing wrong. And Robert had no reason to believe that his job was in peril,” Kolsrud said.

That all changed on Jan. 30, 2026, about two months after the drawing.

“The corporate management came into Robert’s store, sat him down and said, ‘Hey, sorry buddy, you’re fired,’” Kolsrud said.

A few weeks later, Circle K filed a lawsuit over ownership of the ticket.

“Circle K is committed to doing the right thing and maintaining a strong, transparent partnership with the Arizona Lottery. That commitment is precisely why we have asked the court how best to proceed under these unique circumstances. It is not accurate to characterize this as a lawsuit against any specific party,” a company spokesperson said in a statement at the time.

Fired Circle K manager: ‘It’s been real hard on my family’

Meanwhile, Gawlitza said he’s struggling to find another job as the case works its way through the court system.

“He feels like what happened has ruined his name and reputation,” Kolsrud said.

Potential employers see him only as “the one that tried to claim that lottery ticket” after doing a quick internet search on his rare name, Kolsrud said.

“Immediately they’ll Google your name and then all this news media stuff comes up over this case, and that immediately shuts them down,” Gawlitza explained. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, we’ll get back to you.’ And then I never hear anything. So, it’s been real hard on my family. My wife’s been the only one really bringing in the income to help support my family.”

Gawlitza, a nearly 20-year Circle K employee who worked his way up from cashier to store manager, plans to ask for his job back after the legal battle concludes.

“In a perfect world, Circle K would give us the ticket back and reinstate Robert as the store manager. … If we got everything that we wanted, it would be those two things,” Kolsrud said.

KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Balin Overstolz-McNair contributed to this report.

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