Patricia Scharville of Wake Forest left a lottery ticket worth $1 million in a drawer for six weeks before remembering to scratch it, and discovering her good luck.
“We bought tickets, put them in a drawer because we came home to eat dinner, and we just forgot about them,” she recalled. “We just scratched it off last week. It was a nice Saturday night, we were sitting on the front porch, and we thought, ‘Let’s scratch off the tickets. We feel lucky tonight!’”
She was right. Scharville and her husband went from feeling lucky to disbelief.
“I just handed it to him and said, ‘I think there’s something wrong with this ticket,’” she said. “He looked at the ticket and was like, ‘Oh my god.’ And so I was like, ‘Ok, so it’s real!’”
Scharville bought her $10 $1,000,000 Bankroll ticket at the OHM Quick Shop on Capital Boulevard in Wake Forest. She had the choice of taking the $1 million prize as an annuity of $50,000 a year for 20 years or a lump sum of $600,000. She chose the lump sum of $600,000 and took home $424,503 after required federal and state tax withholdings.
“We’ve always said we wanted to have a beach house,” said Scharville as she claimed her prize Friday at lottery headquarters in Raleigh. And she might even let her two grown sons stay there from time to time, she joked.
The $1,000,000 Bankroll game launched in November 2020 with five $1 million top prizes. One remains to be won.
Ticket sales from scratch-off games make it possible for the lottery to raise more than $725 million per year for education. For details on how $62.8 million raised by the lottery made a difference in Wake County in 2020, visit www.nclottery.com and click on the “Impact” section.
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