Winning tickets returned: Honesty the ticket for soldier
Published: May 31, 2006
To be honest, Edward Boniberger admitted, he was going to keep the lottery ticket.
The Iraq war veteran and Farmingdale resident said that was his first inclination when he found the packet of lottery tickets on the counter of a Bay Shore 7-Eleven on Monday. So he stuck the stack of tickets in his truck — and was in celebration mode when he checked them about five hours later and found a winning Pick Four ticket worth $2,500.
Then Boniberger, who spent a year on combat patrol in Baghdad as a sergeant with Bravo Company First Battalion 69th Infantry before returning home in September, saw the ticket had been signed by the woman who lost it: Mary Ann Doerrbecker.
His first reaction?
“Disappointment,” Boniberger, 33, said yesterday. “I knew she knew she had won. … I felt bad.”
Doerrbecker, 59, of Bay Shore, did not even know the ticket was missing until she was informed late Monday by police from Suffolk County’s Third Precinct after Boniberger had contacted them. “I didn’t realize I lost it,” she said. “I thought I had put it back in my pocketbook.”
A loading dock supervisor for Yellow Transportation, a trucking company in Central Islip where she has worked for 29 years, Doerrbecker bought the winning ticket — 1946, the year she was born — on Friday. She checked her computer Sunday, saw the ticket was a winner and signed it, writing in her Social Security number.
She wanted to cash it as quickly as possible, but knew the New York State Lottery office in Garden City was closed Monday for Memorial Day.
Instead, she went to buy more lottery tickets — and left the packet behind.
Doerrbecker said she spends about $25 a week on lottery tickets. She plays everything, although her favorite games are Pick Three, Pick Four and Take Five. She said she has won at least $2,500 “three or four times.” With her latest winnings she planned to pay some bills and buy a computer as well as a toy car for her grandson Willem, 3.
“I didn’t realize I’d be stupid enough to leave the ticket on a counter somewhere,” she said. “I guess it was meant to be — that the person who picked it up was honest and went through the trouble to find me.”
In the end, Boniberger said he was glad he did the right thing — even though the 1991 graduate of Islip High School, unemployed since his return from Iraq, said he could have used the money.
“It feels better giving it back to this woman than keeping it for myself,” Boniberger said, standing outside the 7-Eleven next to Doerrbecker. “It’s way better, because I know she could use it.”
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