Maryland dad hits $50,000 lottery prize but couldn't find his ticket. Then, he realized it's laundry day.
Sometimes decisions made in the nick of time can completely turn around a person's life. Winning a lottery is all about luck, but a father of two got a shot at it because he stayed sharp and saved his winning ticket from getting washed away. Eric Cotton from Prince George’s County said that his girlfriend is notorious for doing the laundry without checking the pocket for things before washing them. This is why when he saw his girlfriend loading the washing machine, it struck Cotton that the four Powerball tickets that he had recently bought might still be in the pockets of the pants about to get rinsed.
His intuition was correct and before it was too late Eric dug out the four tickets, before sitting down to scan them one by one using the Maryland Lottery app on his phone. "Five minutes later, she was washing clothes," he said. The first three tickets yielded no surprises but that fourth ticket was special. "I looked back at her and she said, 'What’s wrong?'" He happily revealed to her that the last ticket that he scanned had won a $50,000 third-tier prize!
A fan of scratch-offs, Powerball, and Mega Millions, Eric is a lottery enthusiast who usually waits until the jackpot surpasses the $50 million mark to play. This time, Eric got $50,000 and said that most of this would go into savings to buy a house for his family of four. The father of two, who works as a truck driver, added that some of the funds will also be utilized to throw his daughter a birthday party.
In another such story of a man finding his lottery ticket at the last moment, a grandad named Jimmie Smith was able to get his hands on lottery winnings after he heard an announcement on television that a particular lottery ticket hadn’t found its prize winner yet. Smith who is an enthusiastic lottery ticket buyer thought of checking his closet after he heard the announcement that the lottery would soon be closed since the winner hadn't turned up. "I ended up with a stack - a pile of tickets, including the one they were talking about on the news," he told lottery officials. "I stood there for a minute thinking, ‘Do I see what I think I see?" he added, according to NJ.com.
Soon Smith realized that he would be winning $24.1 and later opted to take the prize in laddered payments over the next 26 years, which is a choice often recommended by financial experts. Smith who won the prize had the winning numbers 5-12-13-22-25 and 35, and the ticket was bought from a grocery and tobacco shop in the Tribecca neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Following the incident, the lottery officials released a statement that said, "We urge New York Lottery players: Check your pockets. Check your glove box. Look under the couch cushions. If you have this winning ticket, we look forward to meeting you," Gweneth Dean, director of the Commission’sDivision of the Lottery, said at the time."
