Lottery Winner Lands in Jail After Drug Bust

Talk about ups and downs.

On Aug. 30, Terry Garrett, 39, of San Diego won $1 million in the California Lottery’s Big Spin. With his first year’s installment of $40,000 he paid off some bills. He gave some money to his mother in Florida. He vowed to break a drug habit that had dogged him throughout his adult life.

And Garrett went out and paid $10,000 cash for a brand-new Buick Skylark--the first car he had ever owned.

Police say Garrett was behind the wheel of the Buick on Thursday, when he, his girlfriend and a buddy were arrested by undercover officers who had set them up for a drug bust.

Now Garrett, less than a month after collecting the first of his lottery winnings, is in County Jail, charged with felony counts of selling and possessing cocaine and illegally possessing a firearm.

And the new maroon Skylark is locked up in a federal government parking lot, seized in connection with the cocaine bust and subject to forfeiture to the federal government.

Garrett pleaded innocent to the charges Monday during his arraignment in San Diego Municipal Court. But the drug case is only part of the Key West, Fla., native’s problems.

He was back in court Tuesday, pleading innocent before a San Diego County Superior Court judge--this time to a petty theft charge that predated his winning lottery spin by a little more than a month.

September, for Garrett, is not turning out to be the month that August was.

“We’ve discussed what a loser is,” his attorney, Earl Durham, said Tuesday. Garrett, he said, does not want to be one.

“He tells me, ‘I won $1 million. I can’t afford to be involved in drugs,’ ” Durham said.

According to Durham, Garrett insists he had no idea where he was going last Thursday when he drove one of his roommates, Tony Lewis, to the parking lot of a K mart store in East San Diego.

Officers from the San Diego County Integrated Narcotic Task Force had set up a meeting there with Lewis, a task force spokesman said Tuesday. One month earlier, an undercover officer allegedly bought half an ounce of cocaine from Lewis, 21. The meeting last week at the K mart parking lot was to complete a $10,000 purchase of 10 ounces of the drug--and Lewis’ arrest, the spokesman said.

“The blue-light special,” the task force spokesman quipped.

Lewis, too, pleaded innocent to the drug charges Monday, as did Garrett’s girlfriend, Loretta Woods, of San Diego, who was also in the car.

The theft charge involves the alleged heist of two bottles of cognac from a market July 20. Garrett initially was represented in the case by a court-appointed lawyer. But when lottery officials notified him he would be appearing on the Big Spin telecast, Garrett contacted Durham.

“He said, ‘I have no money, but on Saturday I will,’ ” Durham recalled. “I said, ‘OK. I’ll take your case.’ ”

Garrett, an unmarried father of two, is on probation for an earlier narcotics conviction. Court records show he also has been convicted on charges of theft and receiving stolen property. Garrett has acknowledged a longstanding addiction to heroin.

Only once before his Big Spin win had Garrett come before the public eye: to testify this spring for the defense in the murder trial of Sagon Penn, a young San Diego black man accused in the death of a San Diego police officer and the wounding of another.

Durham, himself a former police officer, discounted any suspicion that investigators may have been watching for Garrett to stumble in hopes of making him a less attractive witness in Penn’s pending retrial.

“I’ve spent my whole life in the criminal justice system as a police officer or an attorney, and I don’t believe our district attorney’s office is going to target anybody,” Durham said. “They don’t have the time, any more than I believe our police department would.”

In any event, Garrett remains jailed in lieu of $100,000 bond. A Municipal Court judge will conduct a hearing on his detention Thursday.

Durham, at least, is confident that his client’s fortunes are due for a rebound.

“I don’t want to take a loser’s case,” he said.