I’ve always told my wife that if we ever won the lottery that we are going to have a very specific plan of action set out to make sure that nothing like what you are about to hear about happens to us. Jokingly I tell her it involves an alligator filled moat.
With a mind-blowing 37 million, Margaret Loughrey hit the jackpot when she matched five numbers and two lucky stars after she bought a EuroMillions lottery ticket in an impulse decision.
The 56-year-old bought the winning ticket eight years ago but Loughrey was slowly “destroyed ” by the money one day at a time. Now, in a horror, the lottery winner has been found dead in her home, which was valued at about $172,000.
At the time, Loughrey was living on government benefits valued at about $80 per week. But the lottery ticket changed her life forever, in an instant she became a millionaire, as she bought the winning ticket on a whim while walking back from the Job Center.
She famously spent her winnings on real estate investments, including her bungalow house, a pub, and a former mill that she turned into a leisure center. She donated the remainder of her profits to charity in order to use them for good, She quickly then earned the nickname “Maggie Millions.”
But barely a few months after winning the EuroMillions jackpot, her life started to deteriorate. She said,
“If there is a hell, I have been in it. It has been that bad, “no point having £27m and being lonely. That can’t make me happy. That can only make me happy that everybody else’s happy, and so far everybody is absolutely delighted.”
“I regret winning the lottery, of course, I do. I was a happy person before. I am a human being, and all it has done is destroy my life,” she later claimed that people had “stolen millions” of dollars from her.
“You can’t take your money with you. There is no shroud with pockets,” she continued. As for the rest of her winnings, she had an estimated $7 million left of her lottery jackpot.
Although it was a tragic end for someone who was mired with the stresses of winning so much money by luck in the lottery, Loughrey’s sudden death is not being treated as suspicious by authorities, however.
There was nothing for rescue workers to do because Loughrey could not be revived; she was already dead when the ambulance arrived at her home in Northern Ireland.
Loughrey’s passing was a tragedy for the neighborhood said Paul Gallagher Loughrey’s neighbor and also a local councilor, “Margaret was well known and did a lot of good, charitable work around the town, People are shocked today.”
“Police received a report of the sudden death of a woman at the Ballycolman Lane area of Strabane on Thursday, September 2 2021. A post-mortem is due to take place, but at this stage, the death is not being treated as suspicious,” a spokesperson for the PSNI added.
The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service also confirmed that they visited Loughrey’s home saying, “We were called to an emergency in the Ballycolman area of Strabane at 10.30 am this morning. No patients were taken from the scene,” a NIAS spokesman said.
Source: Awm, belfastlive, thesun
Thomas Cooper