Two upstate roommates say they unwittingly tossed a $1 million Powerball ticket in the garbage— because New Jersey lottery officials failed to promptly update their website with the winning numbers.
Now the Suffern, NY buddies are suing the NJ Lottery Commission and Gov. Chris Christie in hopes of collecting on the discarded ducat, which they believe is currently rotting away in a Canadian trash dump.
“They traced it to a landfill in Ontario,” their lawyer, Edward Charles Logan, told The Post.
“There was even talk of getting a bloodhound at one point.”
Unlucky winners Salvatore Cambria and Erick Onyango had purchased three Powerball tickets at a 7-Eleven in nearby Mahwah, NJ, back in March 2013, according to their suit.
The tickets had sequential serial numbers. Onyango, 30, a bookkeeper, showed them to his roommate and said, “Pick one,” the pair remembered Thursday.
Cambria, 43, a salesman, took the second ticket.
“Hey, why don’t you check that Powerball,” Cambria remembered asking Onyango shortly after the 11 p.m. drawing that night.
Onyango read the wrong “winning” numbers aloud off his iPhone at around 11:13 p.m., he told The Post.
“Oh, here we go again,” Cambria said to himself , figuring his ticket was a dud.
“I didn’t even rip it,” he said of the $1 million ticket. “I crumpled it an put it in my cigarette pack and threw it in the garbage.”
Onyango, meanwhile, put his own two losing tickets aside.
Back at the Mahwah 7-Eleven two days later, Gladys, the clerk, looked at Onyango funny.
“Boo,” she said, using her nickname for Onyango, “I thought I sold you the winning ticket.”
Onyango immediately called his roommate, who remembered the tossed ticket’s quick-pick numbers. Before long they realized that their $1 million was crumpled inside Cambria’s discarded pack of Marlboros.
The pair rushed to the town dump.
“There’s a million dollar ticket in one of these garbage trucks,” Cambria said he thought as they stared hopefully. But by then, their $1 million was being tractor trailored to Canada.
“I punched a hole in my [bedroom] wall, right through the sheetrock,” Cambria remembered of his reaction, which also included what he described as ”hysterical crying.”
“ It wasn’t his fault,” Cambria said of his roommate having read aloud the wrong Powerball numbers two days prior. “But I wanted to punch him in the head,” he joked. “Instead, I took it out on my wall.”
“The Lottery Commission acknowledges that the same vendor sold a million dollar ticket that day, and that it is unclaimed,” the pair’s lawyer said Thursday.
The roomies also still had the first and third ticket in the three-ticket sequence, the lawyer noted.
“We have the tickets with the serial number sold right before the winning ticket, and the one sold right after,” the lawyer said.
But under Lottery Commission rules, no ticket, no million dollars.
“It haunted them back then,” the lawyer added of his very unlucky clients. “And it haunts them now.”
“We cannot comment on pending litigation,” said NJ Lottery Commission spokeswoman Judith Drucker.