A North Carolina woman is $ 1.4 million richer after buying a lottery ticket for a drawing she was not trying to enter.
Elizabeth Johnson of Lucama, about 50 miles east of Raleigh, rushed to get her numbers into a Wednesday night Powerball drawing but missed the 9:57 p.m. cutoff by one minute to buy a ticket with Online Play, according to lottery officials.
Her Quick Pick ticket was good for the drawing three days later, though, which earned her a $ 2 million prize.
Her lucky $ 3 Power Play ticket matched the numbers on all five white balls to win $ 1 million, which doubled to $ 2 million when the 2X multiplier was drawn. The odds of matching all five white balls are 1 in 11.6 million, lottery officials say.
“It was definitely a shock,” Johnson said in a news release. “When I got the message saying that I had won I thought, ‘Well, I didn’t even play tonight.'”
Johnson took home $ 1,415,001 after taxes. She plans to buy a house and go on vacation with her new earnings.
“The kids want to go to Disneyland,” she said. “We’ve never been and now we’ll get to.”
