A Massachusetts woman almost lost her winning lottery ticket forever, but thankfully, due to the kindness and honesty of the owners of the store where she bought it, that wasn't the case.
Lea Rose Fiega purchased the $30 Diamond Millions scratch-off ticket in March at the Lucky Stop convenience store near her job in Southwick.
"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 said.
10 days later, Abhi Shah, the son of the store's owners, located the winning ticket.
"One evening, I was going through the tickets from the trash and found out that she didn't scratch the number," he said. "I scratched the number and it was $1 million underneath the ticket."
Fiega is a regular customer, so Shah went to visit her at work and requested that she come to the store. "So I went over there and that's when they told me. I was in total disbelief. I cried, I hugged them," Fiega said.
Fiega overcame a near-fatal struggle with COVID-19 this past January, which she said felt like "winning the lottery" itself. She gave the family an additional reward on top of the $10,000 bonus it received from the state lottery commission.