RALEIGH – A Henderson man’s decision to break from his regular way of playing Carolina Cash 5 helped him win a $112,571 lottery jackpot.

Alton Garner usually plays his favorite numbers. But Tuesday he decided to let the computer terminal Quick Pick numbers for him. And all five matched the winning numbers in the nightly drawing.

Two days later, Garner went to the store in his home town where he bought his lucky ticket, the Rose Mart on Garnett Street, to have it scanned. When the terminal screen said “Claim at Lottery” he asked the clerk to look up how big the jackpot was for the drawing. She gave him a print-out showing him how much he won.

“It was a shock, I’ll tell you that,” Garner recalled.

He called his wife to share the good news: It was time to take a trip to lottery headquarters.

“We won one hundred and twelve thousand dollars!” he told her. “We’re going to Raleigh!”

Garner, a North Carolina native who worked for many years in cotton manufacturing, said his after-tax winnings of $77,955 would allow him and his wife to pay off the loan on her car, do some home renovations and go on vacation.

The Cash 5 jackpot starts at $50,000 and grows until one or more tickets beat the odds of 1 in 749,398.

Ticket sales make it possible for the lottery to raise more than half a billion dollars a year for education in North Carolina. To see how more than $19 million in lottery funds have benefited specific programs in Vance County, visit nclottery.com and click on the For Education page.