$10,000 winning lottery ticket mistaken for trash

Published 10:37 pm Friday, May 23, 2008

LAKE STEVENS — Somewhere, the holder of a $10,000 winning Mega Millions ticket is heaving a big sigh of relief.

The winning ticket was accidentally thrown away at the Lake Stevens Safeway store where the winner apparently took it hoping to redeem the prize. Thanks to some mad scrambling by the store and workers at a trash collection company the ticket was found.

The man took the ticket to the Safeway store in Lake Stevens on May 17, possibly where it was purchased. Once scanned and determined to be a winner, the ticket was left with a clerk.

When the ticket’s owner returned on Wednesday, the ticket was gone.

“They realized in all likelihood it was in the trash,” said Cherie Myers, spokeswoman for Puget Sound-area Safeway stores.

Store workers called Waste Management, the company that picks up trash at Frontier Village, where the Safeway is located. The company made a special trip to pick up a compacting bin measuring 15 feet long and six feet tall, which was nearly full, said Katie Salinas, spokeswoman for Waste Management. The bin contained about seven tons of trash, she said.

At Safeway’s expense, the bin was taken to the company’s transfer station in Woodinville.

“We pulled six employees and had them empty the compactor and sort through the garbage and look for that one small piece of paper,” Salinas said.

The employees were among those who carry out “recycling composition studies” for local businesses that request it, to analyze their trash, she said.

“So these employees are very efficient at sorting through different material,” Salinas said.

They found the ticket in about two hours.

The ticket was returned to the owner, whose identity and residence have not been revealed. As of Friday afternoon, the owner still hadn’t claimed the prize, said Jacque Coe, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Lottery.

The mistake was made both by the winner and by the clerk, store and lottery officials agreed. Any ticket worth $600 or more should be taken to a lottery office, Coe said.

“Both parties were pretty excited, so he handed the ticket to our employee to hold at Safeway,” said Myers, the Safeway spokeswoman.

The ticket apparently was put in the cash register, where other winning tickets of smaller amounts are kept after being paid off, Myers said. That clerk then went on vacation and it’s believed another employee, thinking the ticket had been paid, tossed it.

Neither spokeswoman could say for certain whether the store would have been liable if the ticket had not been found.

Coe, the lottery spokeswoman, said these instances, while rare, are why lottery officials urge purchasers to sign the back of each ticket.

A few years ago, in a similar incident, a woman in Port Orchard left a winning ticket — “in the millions,” Coe said — with a store clerk and it was lost, then found.

The ticket wasn’t signed, but the ticket was found “and the clerk was honest,” Coe said.

“Whenever you buy a lottery ticket, it’s a bare instrument,” she said. “If left unsigned, anybody can be the claimant. If you buy a lottery ticket, sign the back.”

Reporter Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439 or sheets@heraldnet.com.