NEW YORK: A Gujarati family that owns a store in Massachusetts is being praised for their honesty for returning a $1 million lottery ticket to the woman who had bought it. The woman had accidentally tossed away the ticket in the store where she bought it. “I was a millionaire for a night,” the owner’s son Abhi Shah, who discovered the winning ticket, joked as he recounted his brief Midas touch.
Although he had thought of buying a Tesla car, he decided to return the ticket to Leas Rose Fiega, who had bought the ticket from his mother Aruna Shah. “Who does that? They’re great people. I am beyond blessed,” Fiega said. Maunish Shah, who owns the Lucky Spot store in Springfield, Massachusetts, said that after the ticket was found, “we didn’t sleep two nights”. But they decided to consult his parents in India.
Abhi Shah said: “My grandmother said, ‘let’s not keep the ticket. It’s not right. Just give it back to them. If it’s in your luck, you’ll get it anyhow’.” So, he went to locate her. “He came to my office and said, ‘my mom and dad would like to see you’. 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. I was in total disbelief. I cried, I hugged them,” Fiega said. Maunish Shah said: “I handed her the $1 million ticket and she freaked out and cried like a baby. She sat down on the floor right here.” The Massachusetts State Lottery’s Diamond Millions tickets have to be scratched off so they reveal the numbers that could be the winning combination. But Fiega had not scratched the squares properly.
“I was in a hurry 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,” Fiega said. The family is now fielding interview requests from across US. “If I had kept that million, I wouldn’t have been famous. I’m glad I gave it back,” Abhi said.
