An eagle-eyed supermarket clerk saved a lottery ticket worth $1million and returned it to a 92-year-old great-grandmother after she mistakenly threw it away.
Mary Alice Fallon, of Far Rockaway, bought three scratch-off tickets from Maeve's supermarket in Breezy Point, according to a report in the New York Post.
Fallon thought the tickets were losers and asked grocery clerk Chris Connelly to throw them away for her. Connelly decided to scan the tickets first and realized that one of them was a winner.
Connelly told the NY Post he knew it was a big winner, but he thought maybe it was $1,000. The register told him to the lottery winner had to claim the prize at lottery headquarters, which meant it was worth at least $600.
Fallon scratched off the remaining boxes on the "$1,000,000 Mania" ticket to reveal that it was a $1 million winner to the astonishment of Fallon, a regular customer of his.
The winning granny is sharing her newfound riches with her seven children. Each heir will get about $32,000 a year over the next 20 years after taxes. Lottery rules dictate that the prize money be given out annually over two decades.
Connelly was given $100 by each of Fallon's children as a reward for his honesty.
