Janet Valenti lost all of the $12million jackpot while she was raising her two sons alone after her husband passed away when she accidentally threw the ticket in the bin
A 77-year-old woman has revealed how she coped with being a single mum who lost a staggering $12million lottery prize – after binning the winning ticket more than 30 years ago.
Janet Valenti, from New York, was raising her two teenage kids, Kevin and Jennifer, after her husband, Bruno tragically passed away in 1984. She opted to purchase a $1 lottery ticket at J.N.J. Delicatessen in Graniteville on July 17, 1991, to try and transform their lives. As she was getting ready to spend a weekend at her friend’s house, she threw the tickets away in the rubbish at her home after believing she hadn’t won.
During that weekend, she was completely unaware she had just chucked a life-changing amount of money away. She was informed by a friend a winning ticket had been sold in Staten Island when Janet suddenly realised she had won after seeing the winning numbers. The mum rushed home to try and find the ticket from her rubbish but couldn’t find it. “My next-door neighbour, who has never in her life, the whole time I lived there, ever put my garbage out for collection, she did,” Valenti told the Staten Island Advance.
The rubbish bin had been collected and her dreams of transforming her life for her two kids were over. She quickly contacted lawyers to try and explain the mistake but was told the only way to claim the prize was with a physical lottery ticket. CCTV footage from the retailer of her buying the ticket would also not be helpful, she was told. “I was a wreck,” Valenti recalled to the Staten Island Advance. “I was sick for a long time over it.”
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According to state lottery rules, the winning ticket expires a year after its purchase, on July 17, 1992. The $12million prize went unclaimed and was eventually returned to the state lottery fund. It remarkably remained the largest unclaimed lottery prize in state history at the time.
Janet holds no grudges over binning the winning ticket and believes it could have impacted her life negatively. “Given that kind of money, things can go bad,” Valenti told the Staten Island Advance. “That was a saving grace. Who knows what would have happened if I’d had that money? You read these stories, a lot of people win Lotto, they drop dead. Maybe it was [Bruno] looking out for us to not have that kind of money.” However, she joked “I would have liked it now!.”
The mum-of-two said she still plays the lottery in the hope one day she might win again and this time keeps her ticket. “The most I ever get is a free play or a couple of dollars,” she said. “That’s it.”
