Around the same time, in January, the owners of David's rented Riviera Beach warehouse demanded possession of the unit for lack of payment.
In March, Shawna Edwards was picked up by police near Orlando for failure to pay $17,000 in child support to the father of two of her children.
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On April 4, David's attorney in his drug case, Michael Salnick, told a Palm Beach County judge that he had been unable to communicate with his client since February 13. David was in an Ashland, Kentucky hospital, Salnick said, recuperating from "an intensive surgical procedure."
On July 14, the contents of David's warehouse unit were auctioned to the public. Auctioneer Doug Holladay estimated that the 104 items were worth $160,000. It was "high-end reproduction stuff," Holladay said. David "wasn't educated in the finer things, that's for sure."
Hundreds of people came to the auction. Most were simply curious. The warehouse, lacking air conditioning, was broiling that day.
Mario Lequerique, a tiki-hut builder and antiquities dealer from Royal Palm Beach, bought a pair of carved granite sphinxes for $ 2,750. He figured they were worth at least $7,000. Like most of the attendees, Lequerique had a theory about how Edwards lost his fortune. "If you didn't work for it, the money doesn't mean anything," he said.
Holladay said the warehouse unit was filled with human excrement when David and Shawna left it, even though it had a working bathroom.
The couple also left behind their wedding album.
On July 24, David missed another court appearance in West Palm Beach. Another attorney said that David was still in Kentucky and that he had an "infectious blood disease."
Folks in Ashland say David Lee Edwards is flat broke now. And he can't move his legs.
He made this bed for himself, says his ex-wife, Gail Blanton. She says she hopes he recovers, and that she wishes he had set aside some of the money for Tiffani, now 17.
"If he followed my advice," says James Gibbs, his former financial adviser, "he'd be pulling in about $85,000 a month for the rest of his life."
Gibbs says he put about $16 million of David's winnings in bonds and annuities, to protect David from himself. David cashed them out.
Vernon Holbrook, an Ashland used-car dealer, has known David since the 1950s, when Holbrook worked with David's father at a steel mill. Over the years, Holbrook says, he grew to think of David as a son, and David regarded him like a father. Holbrook says he knows the lottery money is gone because David borrowed money from him and hasn't repaid it.
"He got me for — let me see — I Western Unioned them six, seven thousand dollars," Holbrook says. "I got the tickets here in the drawer, 19 of 'em."
David and Shawna may have a few assets left. To post bail in Kentucky in her child-support case, Shawna produced the deed to a $250,000 Ashland home that she co-owns with her mother free and clear. Once she was released from jail, she said, she could get a home equity loan and pay the back child support. But within 24 hours of her July 18 release, Shawna failed a drug test.
The following Monday, deputies found her at David's bedside at King's Daughters Medical Center in Ashland.
Holbrook says that he speaks with David nearly every day and that the outlook is grim. "I'd say he's on his deathbed, really," he says.
Holbrook chuckles.
"You can't really feel too sorry for somebody that blows millions of dollars."
