Florida man takes home $50,000 prize in Sept. 17 drawing
A Florida man who is working in Baltimore is $50,000 richer after hitting that Powerball prize with a $2 quick-pick ticket in the Sept. 17 drawing. The jackpot chaser, who plays Powerball and Mega Millions every week, is feeling grateful about his good fortune.
“I am blessed,” he said, smiling. “I will try to do good things with it.”
The 59-year-old’s lucky ticket came from Royal Farms #89 at 1021 Middleton Road in Aberdeen. He stopped there after work to grab a drink and his weekly Maryland Lottery tickets. The lucky player headed to his temporary home and didn’t bother watching the drawing that night. In fact, he didn’t find out he won until a week after the drawing.
“I went back to the same Royal Farms, bought my drink, my weekly jackpot games and asked the cashier to check my old tickets,” said the winner. “She says, ‘Oh, for this one, you’ll have to go to Baltimore.’ ” Thinking there was a problem, the St. Augustine resident asked her to check the numbers on his Powerball ticket. He couldn’t believe it when the cashier said he matched all of the numbers in that drawing except one.
“I thought, ‘That can’t be right,’ so I called my wife in Florida and gave her the numbers to check, which she did,” he said. “We still didn’t know how much (I’d won) so she called the Lottery’s Claim Center to find out the details and they told her that I won $50,000.”
The father of two adult children plans to spend some of the winnings on his daughter’s upcoming wedding. When asked about the rest, he said, “We’ll see. You can do a lot of good things with that.”
No one hit the jackpot on Saturday, so it rolled to $60 million with a cash option of $40.7 million for the next drawing on Wednesday, Sept. 28.