18-03-2025
Mom startles daughter awake with early morning call about big lottery win. ‘I won'
When a Maryland woman realized she won a big lottery prize, she quickly called her daughter.
'Mind you it was early and she woke me up,' the woman's daughter said in a March 18 Maryland Lottery news release. 'She's whispering in the phone, 'I won.''
The Burtonsville mother's call came after she checked her Powerball ticket for the Oct. 23 drawing and learned she had won $50,000, lottery officials said.
'I had to go over the numbers three or four times to make sure I was seeing it correctly,' the winner told lottery officials.
Sure enough, the woman won a third-tier prize by matching four white balls and the red Powerball, according to lottery officials.
The retired federal government worker is an occasional lottery player and bought her ticket when 'she noticed the Powerball, Mega Million and Multi-Match jackpots were pretty high' last fall, lottery officials said.
But even after learning of her big win she didn't claim her prize right away, lottery officials said.
Instead, 'Lucky Lady' waited until the 'luckiest day of the year', St. Patrick's Day, to claim her prize, lottery officials said.
Burtonsville is about a 20-mile drive southwest from Baltimore.
What to know about Powerball
To score the jackpot in the Powerball, a player must match all five white balls and the red Powerball.
The odds of scoring the jackpot prize are 1 in 292,201,338.
Tickets can be bought on the day of the drawing, but sales times and price vary by state.
Drawings are broadcast Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays at 10:59 p.m. ET and can be streamed online.
Powerball is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
