Willis, a maintenance man and father of four, chose his numbers based on family birthdays and played the same slip until it could "no longer be read by the terminal," according to a police affidavit.
"He's a guy living day to day," said his lawyer, Randy Howry, who met with Willis on Wednesday in Austin.
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In hindsight, Willis may have missed several opportunities to prevent the ensuing debacle.
He never saw the drawing on TV, he later told investigators, because he didn't know how to find it.
He might have read about the winning numbers but he recently stopped buying the newspaper.
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The day after the drawing, when Rahman told Joshi that their store had sold a million-dollar ticket, the clerk laughed and seemed as surprised as everyone else, Rahman said.
But by the time Willis walked in the next day, police said, Joshi had hatched the most dastardly of get-rich-quick schemes.
As he always did, Willis handed the clerk his tickets, and Joshi dutifully handed him back a $2 prize for one of them.
The clerk, according to the affidavit, neglected to mention that another ticket was worth $1 million.
Willis might never have learned of his would-be fortune's misfortune if Joshi's coworkers hadn't sleuthed it out.
Rahman said he and the Lucky Food Store manager got suspicious when Joshi turned in his notice two weeks after the drawing _ saying he was moving back to Nepal to help his cousin with her perfume store.
Alarm bells rang when the men learned that Joshi had claimed the prize from a lottery center in Austin, Texas. In four years, they said, they had never seen him buy a lottery ticket.
The men tried to call Joshi to confront him, Rahman said, but he wouldn't pick up the phone.
At the end of July, two months after the drawing, the Lucky Store manager tipped off the Texas Lottery Commission.
A commission investigator visited the store and, after poring over receipts, determined Willis had bought the winning ticket.
