Alabama waitress receives $10 million lottery ticket as a tip — but it turned her life upside down

Winning a lottery is supposed to change a person's life for the better, but someone who suddenly ends up with a massive amount of cash could easily earn the ire of several people. A waitress who won a whopping $10 million with a lottery ticket that she got as a tip, now describes how it ruined her life, leading to lawsuits, a shooting incident, and an attempted kidnapping. Tonda Dickerson was given the lottery ticket while she was working at a Waffle House in Alabama back in 1999. However, when she won, it turned out to a bad news, instead of a great one. 

The case summary of Dickerson v. Deno (2000) states, “The plaintiffs sued Dickerson, alleging that they and Dickerson had orally contracted with each other that if any one of them should win, then the winner would share any lottery winnings with the other ticket recipients," according to Historyflix.

The trouble initially did not come from the person named Edward Seward, who had given the ticket to Dickerson, but from her colleagues who wanted a piece of her winnings. They accused her of breaking a promise to split the winnings from the ticket.

On the other hand, the summary of a separate lawsuit, Seward v. Dickerson (2002) says, "Seward did not expect to share any potential lottery winnings based on the tickets he gave away, but he claimed that he was promised a new truck by the employees of the Waffle House if one of the tickets he distributed there was a winning ticket."

Dickerson was taken to an Alabama court when she was sued for a million dollars by four fellow waitresses, and the court ruled against her in just 45 minutes, according to local news website AL.com. A couple at the restaurant, who testified against her, said that Dickerson had told them about the deal with her colleagues.

The waitress later rejected an offer from the court to keep $3 million and started putting the cash into a family business that she had set up. As for the customer's claim that Dickerson had promised him a new truck if she won the lottery with the ticket that he gave to her, lawyers argued that it was a simple comment and meant nothing.

However, things took a dark turn when Dickerson's ex-husband, Stacy Martin, kidnapped her and took her to a boat jetty in Jackson County, North Alabama. In addition to all that, she was then asked to pay $1 million in "gift taxes" on top of her income tax. In 2012 it was ruled that she had to pay taxes on her jackpot, but instead of the full amount, she was asked to part with a percentage of the "gift portion", Forbes reported.

Ultimately she was able to keep the bulk of her money and today Dickerson retains a portion of her winnings but isn’t the millionaire most would expect a lottery winner to be. She still lives a pretty modest life and worked at the Gold Nugget Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, as of 2021. She later said in her testimony, "Our family had always talked about if anyone had won any big amount of money in a lottery, that we would take care of each other or share in the family."