Upper Marlboro retiree used magnifying glass to confirm winning ticket
A Powerball player who tracks the game’s winning numbers to pick digits for her tickets has a big home improvement project in mind after winning a third-tier prize of $50,000: She’s planning to put a new roof on her house.
“If I’d won the jackpot, I would have paid the house off!” said the Prince George’s County great-grandmother of one and grandmother of four. The Upper Marlboro resident celebrated her big win in the Feb. 27 drawing by making her first trip to the Lottery Winner’s Circle in Baltimore. The largest Lottery prize she had won previously was $900, she said. A fan of picking her own numbers for her weekly tickets, the lucky lady bought one $6 ticket for the drawing, playing three lines of numbers.
The retired federal government worker didn’t check her until the day after the drawing. The Powerball fan had decided to buy her next batch of tickets that evening and wanted to cash in any small wins if she had one.
“After the soap operas went off, I dug the tickets out of my purse and I sat at the kitchen table,” she said. “I pulled the numbers up on my phone.” She doubted her vision when it appeared she had matched four numbers and the Power Ball on her Feb. 27 ticket. “I got my magnifying glass out,” she added, and confirmed the win but still doubted her Lottery luck.
Before dinner, she drove to a nearby Lottery retailer and quietly checked the ticket on a store’s ticket checker. The message was astonishing. “I started rubbing my eyes,” she recalled, “I said, ‘This is crazy!’” She checked again and again before asking a clerk to scan the ticket. The clerk took her aside and told her to put the ticket in her purse and go straight home and sign it and keep it safe. Our winner did just that.
The happy Powerball player also plans to use some of her prize to help her son financially and to pay bills, in addition to replacing the roof.
She bought her lucky ticket at 7-Eleven #28964 located at 798 Harry S. Truman Drive in Upper Marlboro. No one has hit the jackpot recently, so players can try to win the estimated annuity prize of $161 million up for grabs in the Saturday, March 4 drawing. The estimated cash option is $82.2 million.
