A tale of two jackpots in the Queen City

On the kitchen counter. Under a pillow. In a safe. Where do you keep your draw game tickets? Over the years, we’ve heard it all.

This week, we heard from Tommy Belcher. The remodeler from Charlotte unknowingly drove around with a Carolina Cash 5 ticket worth a quarter of a million dollars stashed in the visor of his truck. He purchased his lucky ticket at Will’s on West Charlotte Highway in Mount Holly.

Belcher was working on his truck Monday when his mother-in-law told him that there was an unclaimed Cash 5 ticket sold at a local store. So he pulled a stack of tickets from the visor and had them checked at store nearby. To Belcher's surprise, one of the tickets had matched all five numbers in the May 28 drawing, winning him the $257,933 jackpot.

Another Cash 5 jackpot – this one worth $272,453 – will go unclaimed unless someone steps forward by 5 p.m. Tuesday with the winning ticket. The lucky ticket for the April 4 drawing was sold at the Shell Food Mart at 2736 Freedom Drive in Charlotte. The winning numbers for the drawing were: 2-9-13-28-34.

To raise awareness of the expiring ticket, the lottery will place a banner inside the store on Thursday afternoon. Draw game tickets expire when they go unclaimed for 180 days after a drawing. By law, when that happens, half of the money goes toward prizes awarded to future winners and the other half goes to benefit education.

We hope to meet the ticketholder here at headquarters before time runs out. In the meantime, the jackpot heading into Wednesday night’s drawing stands at $549,000. Our advice: Sign your tickets, keep them in a safe place – and check to see if you’re a winner!