Just in time for Christmas, Teresa King of Fletcher checked her four month old Powerball ticket, and found out she won $200,000.
“My husband and I keep the tickets in a little dresser beside our bed,” King said. “We had so much going on, we just forgot about them.”
King took her tickets back to the store to check them.
“The clerk told me, ‘I think you just won $200,000,’” King said. “I told her, ‘No I didn’t!’”
King’s ticket for the Aug. 19 drawing was in fact a winner. It beat odds of one in 913,129 to win the prize.
“It’s a Christmas miracle,” King said. “It’s one of those treasures I found that I didn’t know I had.”
King claimed the prize Thursday. After required state and federal tax withholdings, she took home $139,002. King doesn’t know how she’ll use the money yet.
She bought the ticket at the Citistop on Patton Avenue in Asheville. It matched the numbers on the four white balls and the Powerball to win $50,000. Because she added the $1 Power Play feature, the prize quadrupled to $200,000 when the 4X multiplier was drawn.
The jackpot for Saturday’s Powerball drawing has reached $300 million, with an estimated lump sum of $191.1 million.
Ticket sales from draw games like Powerball make it possible for the lottery to raise more than $600 million a year for the state. For details on how lottery funds have made a difference in all of North Carolina’s 100 counties, click on the “Impact” section of the lottery’s website.