Suspicious co-workers are wrong, he testifies
For three days, Jamal Townes listened quietly as his co-workers at Englewood Hospital accused him of being a modern-day Judas for allegedly hiding a $25 million winning lottery ticket from their office pool.
Yesterday, the 27-year-old X-ray technician got the chance to respond.
"I felt attacked, I felt betrayed, angry," Townes, of Englewood, testified in Superior Court in Hackensack, recalling the moment he realized his colleagues had become suspicious of him.
A group of 20 hospital workers has filed a lawsuit in which they claim Townes, the manager of their office lottery pool, used their money to buy the winning ticket for the New Jersey Lottery Big Game Mega Millions drawing on March 15 and then secretly gave it to his former neighbor, Cornell Davis, in a conspiracy to split the prize money.
Davis and his wife, Teri, also of Englewood, claim they bought the ticket on their own. They are expected to testify today in the non-jury trial before Superior Court Judge Marguerite Simon.
Yesterday, Townes denied ever purchasing a ticket for the March 15 drawing. In fact, he said, it would have been impossible for him to do so because he was at work at the exact time the ticket was purchased at an Englewood market.
Dressed in a mustard-colored shirt and a striped tie, Townes was calm on the witness stand during his testimony, which lasted more than an hour.
He said he was "joking" and being "sarcastic" on March 18, the day he walked in to the lounge in the hospital's cardiac catheterization unit where he and the others work, and announced that his "cousin" -- Cornell Davis -- had won the lottery.
"I said, 'Hey everybody, guess what? Don't get suspicious. My cousin won the lottery,'" Townes said.
Townes has since admitted that he and the Davises are not related.
Sounds like Jamal should be angry at himself for not making sure his co-workers unstood when he was buying tickets for the pool and when he might be buying them for himself. There were no mention of whether anyone in the pool gave him money to buy tickets for that drawing, only that if he bought a winning ticket the pool expected to share. Too often, people who are too cheap to buy tickets on their own, put a dollar in a pool and want to believe that there after they own a portion of any winning tickets that a member of the pool buys in the future. If the courts would use the same rules that the lotteries use, these type of cases would not exist. Pool members would make sure they had proof of partial ownership of a ticket before the drawing even if it was a loser.
RJOh
your right, I think he was supposed to buy tickets with past winnings, why nobody kept up with whether he bought them, what the numbers were, why they didnt make copies of the tickets i'll never understand. when it comes to jackpots this is business... not a game where you think your intitled to a portion beause you think he bought the tickets, because you think you were in the pool,