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QUEENS LOTTERY RETAILER RETURNS $1,000,000 WINNING STRATCH-OFF TICKET TO GRATEFUL OWNER
December 23, 2008
Schenectady, NY – Mary Alice Fallon of Rockaway Point, Queens, and her seven children have a million reasons to thank the Queens grocery store clerk who decided to double check a discarded Lottery scratch-off ticket before disposing of it. The ticket, left on the store counter by Fallon because she thought it was a non-winner, turned out to be worth $1,000,000.
“I didn’t think about whether I should return (the ticket) to the customer or not; I just did,” said Christopher “Chris” Connelly, the clerk at Deirdre Maeves Supermarket in Breezy Point, NY. “I yelled, ‘wait, wait you need to come back. This is a big winner!’” After calling Fallon back to the counter, Connelly handed the $1,000,000 Mania instant ticket to the great grandmother of two and told her it was a $1,000,000 winner. Fallon immediately thanked Connelly for his honesty.
“I didn’t scratch the whole ticket. That was a mistake,” said Fallon. “If it wasn’t for (Chris) and his honesty, I could have thrown away $1,000,000 without knowing it. I guess someone was watching out for me.”
Fallon is a regular at the Breezy Point supermarket owned by Connelly’s mother Deirdre Connolly. The avid church-goer said she went to the neighborhood store on November 24, 2008 to buy Lottery scratch off tickets - one ticket from each of the store’s three different vending machines – as part of a routine she has followed religiously for the past 10 years. She never expected that she and her seven children - four sons and three daughters - would be traveling to the Lottery’s Customer Service Center in Garden City the following day to claim a $1,000,000 top prize on one of those tickets.
“Sharing this with my family, being able to give each of them a little extra something, means everything to me,” said the former homemaker who enjoys playing Lottery games as “one of life’s simple pleasures.”
Fallon and her children opted to claim the ticket as a group and will split the $1,000,000 annuity prize. Each will receive an annual payment of $6,250 before taxes. The annual net check for each will total more than $4,000.
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