Cashier says she intended on returning the Pick 4 ticket

By Kate Northrop

DELAND, Fla. — A Walmart cashier was arrested after a customer presented a winning lottery ticket worth thousands and pocketed it instead of returning it.

A lottery retailer employee was arrested on a fraud charge after she kept a winning ticket a player was intending to claim but argued that she was ignorant of regular lottery procedures and was intending to return it anyway.

On June 14 at about 4:00 p.m., a police officer arrived at the Walmart on South Woodland Boulevard after being alerted to a theft that occurred just less than an hour earlier.

Store manager Brenda Bowman was approached by one of her store employees about an elderly man who had needed help with his winning lottery ticket. More specifically, it was missing.

The customer, Willie Lee Corley Jr., had visited the gas station earlier that afternoon with a lottery ticket that won $2,700, but it was too big of an amount for the retailer to pay out in person. He needed to claim the ticket by another means, either via mail or visiting a Florida Lottery District Office.

The clerk handling the interaction, Tameka Hall, 40, scanned the ticket to confirm it was a winner. She provided him the receipt that contained the instructions on how to claim the prize but did not give him the ticket back. Corley Jr. left the store.

Corley Jr. told Deputy Aberle that he plays the same numbers daily: 5-2-4-4, 4-1-5-0, 7-3-3-1, and 1-9-4-4. He won the $2,700 prize with number combination 5-2-4-4 but didn't realize that he was missing the ticket when the clerk handed the receipt back to him. He returned to the retailer to retrieve the ticket when he realized it was missing.

When Bowman reviewed security footage recording the initial interaction between Corley Jr. and Hall, she noticed Hall grabbing Corley Jr.'s ticket off the machine, fold it up, and put it in the left pocket of her uniform vest. She eventually left work for the day, an affidavit recounts.

Police obtained the video footage as evidence and took Corley Jr.'s statement. Officials were unable to interview or arrest Hall right away due to shift changes, other calls for service, and because Walmart did not have a good address for Hall on file.

Walmart summoned Hall in person for an interview the next morning, where Deputy Sanders heard Hall give her side of the story.

After Corley Jr. had left the store, Hall said, another customer came in wanting to make a lottery transaction at the counter. That was when she noticed that she hadn't returned his ticket to him earlier. Intending on quickly assisting the next customer that just came in, and since he had already left, she placed the ticket in her pocket. However, she left work for the day with the ticket in her possession, she explained in her interview.

Hall told Deputy Sanders that she wasn't sure why she had kept the ticket in hindsight. She stated she wasn't fully aware of the process to claim a prize and "did not intend to deprive Corley of his winnings," arrest documents say. She went on to say that she intended to eventually give the ticket to a Walmart manager, but police noted that no manager had been given a ticket upon her arrival the following day.

She admitted to having the ticket in her possession and led authorities out to her car, where she retrieved it from the front passenger seat.

The ticket was taken to the Volusia Sheriff's Office for safekeeping, and Corley Jr. was contacted to have him collect it. Police also alerted the Florida Lottery Division of Security of the incident.

At the end, officials determined that Hall knowingly took the ticket and intended to appropriate it for her own use and charged her with one count of Grand Theft between $750 and $5,000.

Hall was booked into Volusia County Branch Jail on June 15 and was released on a $2,500 bond later that same day.

Hall's arraignment is set for July 9.

(Click to display full-size in gallery)Tameka Hall, 40, was charged with felony grand for allegedly swiping an elderly man's lottery ticket.