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Ontario man won $2.5M lottery, but forgot the ticket in his bag for a month

The ticket was one of two winning ones that would split the top prize of $5-million in the Dec. 28 Lotto 6/49 Classic Jackpot draw

Ontario man won $2.5M lottery, but forgot the ticket in his bag for a month

An Ontario man sat on a winning lottery ticket for a month before realizing he’d won the multimillion dollar pot: It was stashed away in his bag that entire time.

Jerry Carpenter of Terrace Bay, Ontario, bought the ticket at a Husky Truck Stop in Mississauga in a fit of boredom. He and his family had returned from a tropical vacation but were stuck in Toronto because of a snowstorm.

The ticket was one of two winning ones that would split the top prize of $5-million in the Dec. 28 Lotto 6/49 Classic Jackpot draw. Carpenter wouldn't know that for a while because he immediately forgot about the tickets after buying them.

A month later, I was looking for my daughter's passport when I came across my tickets.

"We were returning from a family trip in Punta Cana and ended up stuck in Toronto due to a snowstorm, so I decided to pick up some tickets to kill some time," the engineer said at the OLG Prize Centre in Toronto, where he came to retrieve his prize.

“I shoved them in my bag and forgot about them.”

The 51-year-old didn’t think about the tickets again until he was cleaning out his bag.

"A month later, I was looking for my daughter's passport when I came across my tickets,” Carpenter said.

“I checked them on the OLG App and was so shocked to discover my win! My wife said she felt numb.”

Carpenter has plenty of dreams he intends to cross off his bucket list now that he’s a millionaire. These include investing in his retirement, setting up a fund for his children's education, taking a train trip through Europe, and buying a sailboat, which has always been his dream.

"It feels like a rollercoaster ride,” he said of this recent life change. “We went from getting stuck in Toronto because of our cancelled flights to winning $2.5 million."