Bad News From Big Prize Winner
A McDonald's $1 million-prize winner charged with battery and released on bond last week was back in jail Sunday, charged with violating probation, police said.
Patrick Collier, a Los Angeles native, was one of five winners in a McDonald's giveaway Labor Day weekend. He was released on $2,500 bond last Tuesday hours after he was arrested and charged with aggravated battery against his 29-year-old fiancee, Sandra Fabian.
But authorities in Florida's Orange County charged him Friday with violating his probation and took him into custody, a Volusia County Branch Jail officer said Sunday.
Collier, 35, had been released on probation for trying to cash a forged check in Orlando last year, according to court records.
State records show that Collier was arrested 14 times in Central Florida between May 1994 and September 2001, four times for domestic violence.
Collier, who lived in a rented home in Ormond Beach, went into an area McDonald's Sept. 1 to buy Fabian a 99-cent breakfast sandwich and walked out the winner of the $1 million instant prize.
Just months before winning the $1 million prize, Collier and Fabian were homeless, sleeping on cardboard boxes, earning $50 a day as laborers when they found work.
Collier is supposed to get $50,000 each year from McDonald's for the next 20 years.
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