Locating Winner A Matter Of Chance Lottery Representative Finds Woman Against All Odds

Mike Helppie had given up.

The man charged with finding $8,000 Idaho lottery winner Tamra Hiebert had tried everything. No luck.

Beginning Aug. 4, he called her, but got an answering machine. He express mailed a letter. No response. Monday he tacked a note to the door of her Coeur d’Alene home. Nothing.

Frustrated, Helppie, a lottery sales representative, fell back on his routine. Wednesday, he wandered into a Post Falls 7-Eleven store to talk to the manager about new lottery tickets.

“I’m waiting for the manager and I look up and there’s a time card for Tamra Hiebert,” Helppie said. “I asked ‘Does this gal work here?’ The manager said ‘She’s stocking shelves right over there.”’

“It was very, very weird,” he said.

Helppie turned and told Hiebert he’d been looking for her. He told her she had won the Crazy 8 game - an $8,000 drawing held every eight weeks.

“At first, I thought he was joking,” Hiebert said. “I never won anything in my life.”

Hiebert, 23, didn’t believe Helppie until he recited her Coeur d’Alene address from memory.

“She was very excited,” Helppie said. “It was great.”

And a bit surreal.

Helppie had been unable to track Hiebert down because she had moved with her boyfriend from Coeur d’Alene to a mobile home park in Post Falls that weekend. Her mother had packed up the answering machine Saturday. The note, presumably, still is tacked to the door.

“I’ve run into winners after they’ve picked up their checks,” Helppie said. “I’ve heard of retailers selling a ticket they had set aside for themselves only to find out later it’s a winner. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Hiebert, who plays the lottery daily after work at the convenience store, said she may buy a new car or put a down payment on a house or a trailer. She also may save it for her new child, expected in four months.

“I haven’t really decided,” she said. “I thought I was dreaming most of the day.”

, DataTimes