A Baltimore County pair stopped by lottery headquarters Sept. 5 to claim a prize that they still don’t quite believe is real. The once-in-a-while lottery players purchased tickets with their eyes on the billion-dollar Powerball jackpot, but had given not a thought to the game’s eight lower-tier prizes. No thought, that is, until they checked their tickets with their lottery app and realized they had won $50,000.
“When I saw that the jackpot had rolled, I immediately began planning to get more tickets for the next drawing,” one of the winners, a construction manager, said Sept. 5 when the two claimed the prize at Lottery headquarters in Baltimore. The friends started buying tickets together when Powerball’s jackpot reached $500 million. It was the other half of the team, an interior decorator, who discovered the good news.
Shocked by the message on her Maryland Lottery app, she called her partner.
“I checked it five or six times before picking up the phone, just to be 100% sure. Every time it said $50,000,” she said. The conversation was eventually a happy one, but only after the two were able to convince each other that the win was real.
The Cockeysville residents report they will keep buying Powerball tickets as the jackpot continues to roll, their minds still on a prize that’s well north of a billion dollars. They already consider themselves winners, though, thrilled with their $50,000 third-tier prize.
“It really hasn’t sunk in yet, for either of us.”
The Wawa convenience store at 10111 York Road in Cockeysville sold the $50,000 winning ticket. The Powerball jackpot for the next drawing, Sept. 6, has an estimated annuity value of $1.8 billion with an estimated cash option of $826.4 million.
