So you find a million dollar lottery ticket. But you know it's not yours. What do you do? What DO you DO?
If you're Abhi Shah, from the family that owns a convenience store in Southwick, Massachusetts, you do the right thing. Abhi, 30, was going through a pile of discarded scratchers recently, when he found a Diamond Millions that wasn't completely scratched off. He found it was a million dollar winner.
Just like any of us, his first thought was "I'm rich!" He thought of buying a house...a Tesla...another convenience store. But he talked it over with his parents and they even called a grandmother in India, who told them they were right to be honest and give the ticket back.
The article in The Washington POST doesn't really make it clear, but somehow the family knew who had bought the ticket and carelessly put it in the reject stack.
“We had mixed emotions,” Shah told The Post. “We didn’t sleep for two nights, but I don’t know what happened. My inner soul told me, ‘That’s not right. You know who that person is. You should give that ticket back to them.' And that’s exactly what I did.”
"That person" is Lea Rose Fiega, who is a regular at the store. She works nearby for an insurance company, and pops in a couple of times a week on lunch to buy scratchers. It's her habit to give the clerk the losing tickets; they stack them up behind the register. She bought this $30 ticket from Aruna, Shah's mom, and handed it back, without fully scratching it off. “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 the Associated Press.
It was ten days later that Shah saw the ticket and scratched the remaining square.
Even though Fiega would never have known what happened, the family insisted on her having the ticket. Shah even drove down to her office when she didn't come in the store for several days. Fiega thought maybe she was in trouble for having forgotten to pay for something, but Shah reassured her: “No, you’re good. It’s something that’s going to change your life.”
Back to the store they went, and when the family handed her the $1,000,000 ticket, she began crying, her body shaking.
Wouldn't you do the same?
“It was a really great moment,” Shah told The POST. “Seeing her happy, I got so happy. I knew I did the right thing. I shouldn’t keep anybody’s money. Money is not everything in life.”
Fiega told the AP she duked the family in on some of her winnings, and of course the family gets $10,000 for selling the ticket, so everybody is bucks up.
It's never the wrong time to do the right thing!
The Shah family (Abhi, Maunish, Varija, Aruna and Anjani).
4 comments:
Wow, nice story.
It's a nice story but how great would it be if such honesty were unremarkable?
When my daughter was living in New York City a few years ago, she left her wallet in a taxi. Kicking herself, she set about canceling credit cards and replacing IDs. The following day, the taxi driver, on his own time, showed up at her apartment door with the wallet, all its contents present. He declined the token reward she offered.
There is goodness all around! I'm glad she found some!
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