Faithful player claims top prize in Feb. 22 Bonus Match 5 drawing
A Baltimore City woman didn’t discover her $50,000 winning Bonus Match 5 ticket for a month after mistakenly thinking it was only worth $2. Instead of double-checking the quick-pick ticket, she simply added it to a stack of tickets to scan and cash later. Was she ever in for a surprise!
The 68-year-old Bonus Match 5 fan plays the game often and usually purchases two tickets. She selects the numbers on one ticket and lets the terminal quick-pick the numbers on the second ticket. The lucky lady followed her routine on Feb. 22. That evening, after looking over her tickets, the grandmother thought she only matched two balls plus the Bonus Ball on the quick-pick ticket. That’s just a $2 win, so she threw the ticket on a pile with the others and forgot about it.
A month later, as part of her routine, she took all of her suspected winning tickets to a Lottery retailer to scan and cash. She was blown away when she came to that $2 win and the scanner showed her a whopping $50,000 prize.
“When I saw it, I said, ‘This machine is playing jokes,’” she told Lottery officials. “Really, I did not believe it.”
The retired Baltimore City Public Schools employee plans to take a vacation with her newfound wealth, make some home improvements and invest the rest. The lucky lady found her winning ticket at the 25th Street Sunoco located at 750 East 25th Street in Baltimore. The retailer will receive a $500 bonus from the Lottery for its role in selling a top-prize winning Bonus Match 5 ticket.
