Louisville family wins $50,000 on Powerball during $1.7 billion jackpot run

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. -A Louisville family’s last-minute purchase of several Powerball® tickets paid off with a $50,000 win during the game’s recent $1.7 billion jackpot run.

According to the Kentucky Lottery, the family, who asked to remain anonymous, said they debated for hours about buying tickets for the Sept. 6 drawing, which featured the second-largest jackpot in the game’s history.

“When the jackpot gets high, you start noticing because everybody’s buzzing. Everybody’s talking about it. It’s everywhere,” the mom said. “But I didn’t want to go buy a ticket, but my grandson kept pushing us to. So, at nine that night I said, ‘come on, let’s go.’”

The family said they decided to go to three different lottery retailers to buy their tickets, with the winning ticket being purchased at M&S Food Mart at 11550 Bluegrass Parkway in Louisville, which will earn $500 for selling the ticket.

The next afternoon, the family was watching NFL games and totally forgot about their ticket purchases the night before.

“Around 3 p.m. the entire family was around, and I just grabbed the tickets out of my purse and handed them to my son,” the mom said.

“I got on my phone and asked Siri to pull up the winning numbers,” the son said. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought I had the wrong date, or the ticket was a joke.”

He handed the winning ticket back to his mom for her to read the numbers to him.

After she read him the numbers, the son said to his mom: “Oh my God, you were almost a billionaire. You were one number away from being a billionaire.”

The son said he was so focused on missing the jackpot, he couldn’t figure out how much they had won on the ticket.

“So my brother came over and looked up the winning numbers for himself. We still didn’t believe it,” the son said.

The family, not trusting themselves, got in their car and drove to a nearby lottery retailer to scan the ticket.

“They went in and scanned it and I sat in the car,” the mom said. “They came back out and said we had won $50,000 and I was in shock. We didn’t say a word to each other on the way home because we were all in shock,” she joked.

They plan to use the money to make home improvements and put it toward educational support for their family.