NEED TO KNOW
- Pamela Howard-Thornton, of Shepherdsville, Ky., said she had a dream about winning the lottery
- The next day, she bought four tickets, one of which she accidentally threw before realizing it was missing
- Howard-Thornton said she will purchase a new car and share some of the money with her mom after winning the jackpot
A Kentucky woman won a scratch-off lottery game’s top prize after accidentally throwing away the lucky ticket.
Pamela Howard-Thornton, of Shepherdsville told lottery officials that her story began after she had a dream she won big..
The following day, she went to a Speedway store in Lebanon Junction with the intention of purchasing a Flamingo Bingo ticket. However, Howard-Thornton ended up buying a different ticket that ended up netting her $200.
She went home but said she “kept telling myself, ‘Go get that ticket.’ ”
Later that same day, Howard-Thornton returned to the store and used her earlier winnings to buy four Flamingo Bingo tickets, which has a top prize of $80,000.
“They laid on the counter all day long,” she told lottery officials, according to a press release. “I had forgotten about them so at about 11:30 that night I decided to play them. The first three were not winners so I put them in the trash. Then I was like ‘Where’s my fourth ticket?’ I looked in the trash and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I threw it away.’ ”
But afterwards, she was still unsure she had actually won, until she canned it using the Kentucky Lottery Mobile app. That was when she started crying, shouting and screaming.
“I immediately called my daughter and my mom,” Howard-Thornton told the lottery. “My mom has always said she would give anything if she could just see me hit a big ticket before something happens to her. When I called her the night I won, she was so thankful and happy for me.”
Howard-Thornton came away with $57,600 after taxes. With her winnings, she said she plans to purchase a new car and share some of it with her mother.
Additionally, the Speedway store that sold her the winning ticket was rewarded with $800, the Kentucky Lottery said.
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Howard-Thornton isn’t the only person who retrieved a winning lottery ticket that they earlier discarded.
In 2020, a South Carolina man bought a Palmetto Cash 5 ticket at a gas station. When the numbers from his ticket didn’t match the results, he threw it away. But then he later realized he checked the prior day’s results. He dug the ticket from the trash and found that all five numbers matched, resulting in a $100,000 prize.
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