On the morning of September 3rd, Donna Graziose of Leland woke up to find an email letting her know that she was the winner of a $100,000 Powerball prize.

“We couldn’t believe it,” she recalled.

Graziose, a former 911 operator of 31 years, purchased her $3 Power Play ticket for the Sept. 2 drawing through Online Play on the lottery’s website.

The morning after the drawing, she woke early and checked her phone to find an email from the lottery notifying her of her win. “It said I won but didn’t say the amount so I thought, ‘I better check this out quick!’” recalled Graziose.

After looking up the numbers online and verifying her win, she woke her husband to share the good news. “But he didn’t believe me,” she laughed. “It was very exciting in the morning to wake up to that.”

Graziose’s lucky ticket matched the numbers of four white balls and the Powerball, beating odds of 1 in 900,000 to win a $50,000 prize. Because she paid a $1 more for Power Play, her prize doubled to $100,000 when the 2x multiplier was drawn.

She claimed her prize Monday at lottery headquarters in Raleigh. After required federal and state tax withholdings, she took home $70,751.

Graziose said she and her husband will use the prize money to “pay off our cars and the rest will go into savings.”

No one won Saturday’s Powerball jackpot. The jackpot stands at $34 million as an annuity prize or $27.3 million cash for Wednesday’s drawing.

Powerball is one of four lottery games in North Carolina where players have the option of buying their tickets either through the lottery’s website or with the NC Lottery Official Mobile App. The other games are Mega Millions, Lucky For Life, and Carolina Cash 5.

Ticket sales from draw games like Powerball make it possible for the lottery to raise more than $725 million per year for education. For details on how $5.4 million raised by the lottery made a difference in Brunswick County in 2019, visit www.nclottery.com and click on the “Impact” section.