‘Middle of the night’ call to lottery hotline nets North Carolina woman $1 million
There’s never a bad time to learn you won $1 million, but one North Carolina woman says it happened to her “in the middle of the night.”
Adriene Wynn of Greensboro says she couldn’t sleep after buying a Mega Millions lottery ticket and recalled there was a 24-hour lottery hotline to check for winning numbers.
“I woke up ... and I just thought: ‘Let me call and check the tickets’,” Wynn said in an N.C. Education Lottery news release.
“I called about five times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming or something. When they kept saying the same thing, I kept saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’”
Wynn then did exactly what you’d imagine: Jumped “up and down on my bed like it was a trampoline.”
“If I could have done a cartwheel without breaking anything I would have,” she said in the release.
Wynn won the money (matching five numbers) Tuesday with a $2 ticket, beating odds of “1 in 12.6 million,” the lottery says.
Her ticket is “one of two tickets that won the highest prize nationally,” lottery officials reported. She bought the ticket at a Kwik JP Express store in Greensboro, officials said.
Wynn collected her money Wednesday, taking a lump sum of $707,501 after state and federal taxes, officials said.
Her plan now is to “pay off bills, buy her family a new home, and invest the rest,” she told lottery officials.
The Mega Millions jackpot stands at $168 million as of Thursday evening, and winning would mean beating odds of “1 in 302 million,” officials said.
