SCHREIBER – Jaime Cebrario nearly threw away $38,375.
Luckily, the Schreiber woman wasn’t too hasty tossing out a pile of papers she'd earmarked for the garbage.
Among the pile destined for the trash was a 50/50 ticket from this year’s Scotties Tournament of Hearts, which took place in February at Thunder Bay’s Fort William Gardens.
Cebrario bought a ticket during the final day of competition, but said she missed seeing the numbers displayed on the Gardens’ scoreboard.
When she got home, she checked the ticket, but the numbers didn’t match, or at least she didn’t realize they matched.
Months later, before ditching the ticket for good, Cebrario decided to check the ticket one more time.
“I held onto the ticket because I knew it was unclaimed,” she said, reached by phone on Thursday morning.
“I tossed it in a pile of papers. I always have that pile, the I’ll-get-to-you-later pile. I work in the school system, so I’m off for the summer, so that’s when I started going through the pile. It was actually in the garbage pile. When I tossed it in the garbage, it was sticking out, I said, you know what, I should see if this was ever claimed.”
She searched online, found a Newswatch story that showed the prize had yet to be claimed and decided to compare numbers one last time.
“Sure enough, my number matched,” she said.
“It actually gave me a sick feeling, that it was just sitting there for that long. There was a coffee stain on it, there were numbers missing on it. It made me sick.”
It also made her and her husband mortgage free.
Cebrario said it was her husband’s goal to be debt-free by the time he turned 50, another July 2025 occurrence.
They plan to use about $35,000 of the winnings to pay off their camp, and will have a little fun with the rest.
“It was a weird feeling that came over me,” she said of the moment the couple realized they had the missing winning ticket.
“I was shocked and maybe nervous that I was kind of careless with it. But you never think it’s you. I never thought I would win money, let alone the jackpot.”
Kevin Stranges, president of Fort William Curling Club, said Cebrario cut it close to the Aug. 23rd deadline when she claimed the grand prize on July 8.
He’s just glad there was a happy ending.
“I’m thrilled that our grand prize winner has come forward and the prize has officially been claimed. It’s a great ending to an incredibly successful event — not just for our clubs, but for the city, our surrounding area, and the curling community as a whole. The support we saw throughout the event was truly inspiring and shows how much people care about our sport and region,” Stranges said in an emailed statement.