A Grandma In Iowa Won 343 Million Dollars After Buying A Powerball Ticket With Her Breakfast Pizza
(CNN) An Iowa grandmother won half the $687 million Powerball prize and she didn’t even know it at first. Lerynne West, 51, bought her tickets at Casey’s General Store in the small town of Redfield, Iowa, while grabbing pizza and coffee with her sister. She said it was a special day because she had bought her first home and was moving in that day. West thought she put the lottery ticket in her purse, but she accidentally left it on the floor of her sister’s truck. It lay there for a couple days. When a friend texted the day after the drawing to ask if she had won, West said she hadn’t had a chance to check. She rifled through her purse and realized she didn’t have the ticket. She quickly called her sister, who found it. West looked at the photo of the ticket her sister sent her and checked the numbers on the lottery’s website — she had won! “I told my sister to get in her truck and get that ticket and get up here right now! And, drive slow,” West said in an Iowa Lottery press release.
What a beautiful Iowa story. It doesn’t get much more Iowa than this right here. A grandma goes to her local Casey’s General Store (not a gas station despite what the haters would have you believe) to get her morning coffee and breakfast pizza and she decides to buy a lottery ticket while she’s there. And what happens next? Well first, she loses the ticket in her sister’s truck and thinks nothing of it because winning the lottery is seemingly impossible to win. Then she realizes she has the winning numbers, can’t find her ticket, calls up her sister, finds the ticket and is now worth over 300 million dollars. She can now afford to buy all the Casey’s breakfast pizza (with just the perfect amount of bacon on it) she wants.
Not enough was made about the part where the grandma momentarily lost her winning lottery ticket. They just glossed over it in the article when that’s by far the most dramatic part. Uhhhhhh what? That’s the nightmare scenario everyone worries about when they buy a lottery ticket. You realize you have the winning numbers AND THEN YOU CAN’T FIND THE TICKET. That’s like a recurring nightmare. In fact they’ve made movies about that exact scenario. That ticket went from being worth less than nothing to 343, 900,000 dollars. I can’t even imagine what the grandma’s panic level was out when she couldn’t find the ticket in her purse. If you don’t find that ticket, you kill yourself. Pretty sure that’s the law. It’s the unwritten law for sure.