A North Carolina man used a $20 bill he discovered on the ground to buy a lottery scratch-off ticket that won him a $1 million top prize, officials said.
He found the bill last Tuesday outside a Speedway gas station and convenience store in Boone, the NC Education Lottery said in a statement Friday.
The winner plucked the bill from the ground and used it to fund most of his purchase of a $25 Extreme Cash scratch-off ticket, which touts instant prizes of $40 and that top prize, it said.
Winner Jerry Hicks is from nearby Banner Elk, a Blue Ridge Mountains town between two ski resorts that is also in a region, Avery County, hit hard by last month's post-Hurricane Helene flooding.
Hicks didn't set out to play Extreme Cash.
“They actually didn’t have the ticket I was looking for, so I bought that one instead,” he said in the statement.
Hicks, a master carpenter, went to lottery headquarters Friday to claim his prize, opting for a $600,000 upfront payment over $50,000 a year for 20 years, netting him $429,007 after federal and state taxes, the lottery said.
Hicks didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. He told lottery officials he'll use the money to help his children and to retire after more than five decades as a carpenter, according to the NC Education Lottery statement.
He also plans to eat. A lot.
“We are going to head straight to Golden Corral and eat everything they’ve got,” he said of the North Carolina-based buffet chain, according to the statement.
On Monday, NC Education Lottery officials said Cynthia Moore, of Smithfield, was the first $1 million top-prize winner for its Cashword scratch-off game, introduced in August, after she bought a $10 ticket at a market in Wilson. Three other $1 million prizes remain for Cashword, they said in a separate statement.
For two years in a row, lottery officials said in August, NC Education Lottery games have made more than $1 billion for public schools and other education programs, contributing to the state's more than $15 billion in annual education spending.
