A $20 bill in the car park of a convenience store grew exponentially for the lucky man who found it.
Jerry Hicks, a master carpenter, said he spotted the bill outside of a Speedway on North Carolina Highway 105 in Boone on Tuesday evening.
‘I used that to buy the ticket,’ he said.
The Extreme Cash scratch-off ticket he purchased at the Speedway wasn’t even what he was initially looking for.
‘They actually didn’t have the ticket I was looking for so I bought that one instead,’ he said.
Hicks ended up winning $1million.
The resident of Banner Elk went to the NC Education Lottery headquarters on Friday and picked a $600,000 lump sum payout instead of an annuity of $50,000 over two decades. After state and federal tax withholdings, Hicks received $429,007.
‘We are going to head straight to Golden Corral and eat everything they’ve got,’ he joked, according to the NC Education Lottery.
Hicks plans to use the lottery money to retire after working for 56 years, and also help out his children financially.
The Avery County man is the latest person to win the lottery in North Carolina through an unusual twist of events.
Earlier this month, a man from Hertford in Perquimans County used $10 he got from selling a pumpkin he grew to buy a $5 Xtreme Cashword ticket from a Sun Farms gas station in Elizabeth City. He wound up winning $150,000 and took home $107,251 after state and federal tax withholdings.
And in 2021, a woman from Lucama who unknowingly missed the cutoff for a Powerball lottery drawing and bought a ticket for another drawing won $2million.
‘It was definitely a shock!’ said Elizabeth Johnson at the time.
‘When I got the message saying that I had won I thought, “Well, I didn’t even play tonight.”’
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