Moments after LaQuedra Edwards put her $40 lottery allowance into a lottery vending machine at a grocery store in Southern California, she said, “some rude person” bumped into her, causing her to push the wrong button.
She usually chose cheaper Scratchers but had accidentally hit the selection for a $30 ticket, she said, according to a statement Wednesday from the California State Lottery.
She told state lottery officials that the person who bumped into her “didn’t say a thing and just walked out the door.”
Irritated, she headed to her car and scratched the ticket — then discovered that she had won the $10 million prize.
“I didn’t really believe it at first,” Edwards said, according to the statement. She said she started driving but kept staring at the winning ticket. “I pulled over, looked at it again and again, scanned it with my [California Lottery mobile] app, and I just kept thinking this can’t be right,” she added.
The California Lottery’s Scratchers range in price from $1 to $30.
State lottery officials said Edwards purchased the winning 200X Scratchers ticket for $30 in November from a Scratchers vending machine at a Vons Supermarket in Tarzana, Calif., a neighborhood in Los Angeles.
The odds of winning $10 million — the top prize — playing the 200X Scratchers are 1 in more than 3 million, according to the statistics from the state lottery. But strange things do happen when playing the lottery. One woman checked the spam folder in her email and found out that she had won $3 million in the lottery. Another woman accidentally threw away her winning ticket.
Edwards said she plans to use her winnings to buy a house and start her own nonprofit, according to officials.
“I’m still in shock,” she told officials. “All I remember saying once I found out how much I just won was, ‘I’m rich!'”