Lea Rose Fiega lottery ticket: Springfield Massachusetts woman gets back $1m winning lottery ticket she threw away by the store where she bought winning ticket.
A Massachusetts woman who accidentally threw out a US$1 million lottery ticket has collected her winnings thanks to the kindness and honesty of the owners of the store where she bought it.
Lea Rose Fiega of Springfield, bought the $38 Diamond Millions scratch-off ticket in March at the Lucky Stop convenience store in Southwick, Mass., near where she works.
‘I was in a hurry, on lunch break, and just scratched it real quick, and looked at it, and it didn’t look like a winner, so I handed it over to them to throw away,’ she told via WWLP-TV.
The ticket lay behind the counter for 10 days.
‘One evening, I was going through the tickets from the trash and found out that she didn’t scratch the number,’ Abhi Shah, the son of the store’s owners, told the media outlet.
‘I wanted to do something good.’
‘I scratched the number and it was $1 million underneath the ticket.’
‘I had $1 million in my hand,’ Shah told WWLP. ‘I wanted to do something good.’
Fiega is a regular customer, so the family knew immediately who had discarded it.
Shah went to see Fiega at work.
‘He came to my office and said, ‘my Mum and Dad would like to see you,” she said.
‘I said ‘I’m working,’ and he said ‘no you have to come over.’
‘So I went over there and that’s when they told me.’
‘Who does that?’
‘I was in total disbelief. I cried, I hugged them.’
Fiega said overcoming a near-fatal bout with COVID-19 in January was like ‘winning the lottery,’ so she feels doubly fortunate.
‘I mean, who does that? They’re great people. I am beyond blessed,’ the lotto winner said.
Of note, the store gets a $10,000 bonus from the state lottery commission for selling the winning ticket.
Fiega said she gave the family an additional reward.
