Man needs wife to check his winning lottery ticket. ‘I thought something was wrong’
A week before scoring a big win, a lottery player added the contact information for the Maryland Lottery to his phone.
He doesn’t quite know the reason, but the father of three said it had something to do with a “feeling,” lottery officials said in a July 31 news release.
“Sometimes you have to believe,” the Randallstown man told lottery officials, adding that he reads about the winners on the lottery website regularly and “just knew that one day my turn would come.”
His day finally came July 26 when he picked up a few scratch-offs, including two $10 Money Rush tickets, at a 7-Eleven, lottery officials said.
After the man got home from work that day, “he sat with his tickets attached to a clipboard and started scratching them with his lucky quarter,” according to lottery officials.
“To his astonishment,” one of his tickets matched the number 26 — a match that came with a top prize of $100,000, lottery officials said.
“I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me and that it was really a $1,000 win,” the man told lottery officials.
Still in disbelief, the man scanned the ticket with his phone, confirming his $100,000 win.
Even still, “he needed a second pair of eyes” and asked his wife to check his ticket.
“I thought something was wrong,” his wife told lottery officials. “It was like a dream, but not a dream.”
The man told lottery officials he plans to spend his winnings on home repairs and tuck the rest away in savings.
Randallstown is about a 15-mile drive northwest from Baltimore.
This story was originally published July 31, 2024 at 4:17 PM with the headline "Man needs wife to check his winning lottery ticket. ‘I thought something was wrong’."