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| Richard Cerezo with his winning lottery check |
(Scroll down for video) A man found nearly $5 million in a place he least expected, according to a statement released by lottery officials in Illinois.
The man, who was facing foreclosure of his home in Geneva, Illinois, found a solution to his problem.
Richard Cerezo was going through his old lottery tickets, which he kept in a cookie jar, and he took them to the local 7-Eleven to see if he had any winners. For one, it turned out, he had to file a claim, which, according to Cerezo, meant the ticket was worth at least $600.
Excited, he returned home and checked the numbers on his computer.
"With each passing number, my smile was going up and up. When I realized I had all six numbers it was shocking. 'Whoa, can this be?'" Cerezo said in a press conference. "The next day, I called in sick to work and went down to the lottery office in Chicago. I felt that nothing will happen if I get fired," Cerezo also said.
Cerezo talked to lottery officials, and he was told that the ticket was worth $4,850,000. Cerezo said that he bought the ticket in the beginning of the year, which meant he had been sitting on a fortune for months without realizing it.
"It could not have happened at a better time," Cerezo said. "I just thought, this is how God works," he added.
“The man is lucky to have gone through all his old lottery tickets. Imagine if he didn't face foreclosure and never went through those lottery tickets, he would have lost out on $5 million, so the foreclosure actually helped him discover his riches,” Carmen Weaver, 57, of Warwick, Rhode Island told YourJewishNews.com after learning about the lottery ticket that was found in a cookie jar.
Cerezo said he plans to use part of the proceeds to pay off the debt on his house.Mobile video not loading? Click here to view