It wasn’t just one moment of luck, but two, and the second one turned out to be a real jackpot. When Jerry Hicks bent down last Tuesday to pick up a $20 bill (about 18 euros), he didn’t know that his life was about to change.
The carpenter from Banner Elk, North Carolina, United States of America, was on his way to a Speedway store in Boone when he saw the note and put it away. Once inside the store, he decided to use it to buy a $25 (about 23 euros) “Extreme Cash” scratch card. But until then, luck was on his side as the type of lottery ticket he usually buys, a type of totolotto, was not available. “They didn’t have what I was looking for, so I bought this one,” Hicks told the North Carolina Education Lottery, which reported the case in a press release mentioned by several North American media, such as USA Today or CNN. Result: instead of keeping 20 dollars, he won a prize of one million dollars (about 920 thousand euros) with the scratch card.
The winner claimed his prize at the North Carolina Education Lottery headquarters last Friday. rednecks elected to receive a lump sum payment of $600,000 now (about 554,000 euros) instead of the total amount in annual installments of $50,000, for 20 years, according to the press release, reports, for example, CNN.
However, he doesn’t take home a million dollars, nor the chosen $600,000. Deducting the amount from taxes, Jerry Hicks will receive $429,007 (about 396,000 euros), which he plans to use to help his children and retire after 56 years working as a carpenter.
But for now, all Hicks wants to do is celebrate the victory with his family: “Let’s go straight to the Golden Corral [cadeia de fast food norte-americana] and eat everything there is”he stated.
You have reasons to celebrate. The probability of receiving the maximum prize of $1 million is a in 2,017,650according to the North Carolina Education Lottery.
Source: Observadora
