Homeless Man to Spend $500K Lottery Win to Reconnect With Daughter
Michael Engfors, 61, spent last weekend sleeping at a homeless shelter with a winning lottery ticket in his back pocket. Now the former builder wants his $500,000 “Eternal Splendor” scratch-off jackpot to go to finding his long lost daughter.
“I asked him what he was going to do, and he said he wanted to get some skis and he really wanted to connect with his daughter, who he hadn’t seen in over 20 years,” Jeremy Kowalis, a worker at the Aspen Homeless Shelter in Colorado, where Engfors has received care since 2009, told NBC station KUSA of Denver.
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“It couldn’t happen to a neater guy,” Vince Savage, who runs the shelter, told the New York Daily News. He added that the lottery winner is a local builder who lost his business and became homeless after the recession: “He’s from here; he’s worked all his life. Sure, he’s had his problems.”
Engfors, who is divorced and has battled alcoholism, bought the $10 ticket — which had a 1 in 840,000 chance of winning the prize — with the money he makes working odd jobs, according to Savage. “Michael works when he can,” Savage said. “We got a little blowback on Facebook, like ‘What the hell is a homeless person spending money on a lottery?’ I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. He’s spending his own money.’”
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Kowalis suggested that people were inspired by Engfors’s win. “Out of all of the people, especially in Aspen, that could win half a million dollars, it couldn’t happen to a better type of person than somebody who actually uses the homeless shelter,” he said.
Hesitant to step into the spotlight, Engfors has declined interviews with the media, but he holds out hope that the lottery ticket will help him reunite with his only child. “He’s interested in trying to find out how to go about reaching her and reconnecting with her now that he’s got a little bit more means to do so,” Kowalis said, adding that Engfors will get a plane ticket to anywhere his daughter is, as soon as he finds her.
(Top photo: Aspen Homeless Shelter)
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