Ricardo Cerezo was down on his luck. His house was about to be foreclosed on.
That's when his wife reminded him to check the cookie jar, which he had stuffed with lottery tickets in recent months in case of such monetary woes. It's then he discovered that one of them was worth $4.85 million, which he said he will use to pay off his home.
It couldn't have happened at a better time," Cerezo, a management consultant living in Geneva, Ill., told the Chicago Tribune. "I just thought, this is how God works."
The 44-year-old had in his possession the winning ticket from the Feb. 2 drawing that he hadn't bothered to check until this month. He brought the ticket to the 7-Eleven he purchased it from in Aurora, Ill. May 15, where he was awarded the check.
The story unfolded slowly for him as his wife gave him an ultimatum about the tickets that had been long forgotten: Check them out or she would toss them that night.
His first seven draws were duds as a clerk scanned them to no avail, he said. One ticket was worth $3, which he said he intended to use to pay the Pepsi he was going to purchase at the store.
Ticket number eight was a different story as the machine read "file a claim," which he imagined was worth perhaps $600. He was about to get the surprise of his life.
When he pulled the winning ticket, he went online to verify if the numbers matched up and discovered that he had won the jackpot.
"As each number kept matching, the smile kept going higher and higher. And when I realized we had all six numbers, it was that shocking moment of , 'Whoa, can this really be?'" he said in a news conference Wednesday.
In his excitement, he called in sick to work the following Monday.
" . . . [I] went down into Chicago. It's one of feelings where it's okay if they fire me," he said.
He and his wife plan to use the money to not only pay off their mortgage, but take care of extra bills, share their winnings with their children and donate some of it to their favorite churches and organizations.
"It is very important to us that we help others with this money," Cerezo said.
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