A New Jersey man is basking in the good fortune of a $273 million lottery jackpot win that wouldn’t have happened without the kindness of a stranger.
Mike Weirsky, who is unemployed and recently divorced, purchased lottery tickets at a QuickChek supermarket near New Jersey’s border with Pennsylvania.
Then, he said he was distracted by his cellphone — and left the tickets behind. “I put the tickets down, put my money away, did something with my phone and just walked away,” he told reporters on Thursday.
Before the drawing, he says he looked for hours for the tickets at home, then returned to the store to see if they had them.
To his surprise, he found that somebody had handed them in the day before. The cashier “made me explain what I bet and what the tickets were, and she handed them to me, and I walked out.”
