Is this the luckiest couple in the world? Luther Cannon bought two tickets for North Carolina Education Lottery jackpot at the Yemen Food Mart in Rocky Mount, a city in Edgecombe, North Carolina.
He punched in his numbers and gave one of the tickets to his wife, Constance. The next day, the technician at Bridgestone Tyres, went shopping. He stopped at the food mart to check his tickets. He did a double take upon receiving a prompt of “go to lottery headquarters.”
Then he digested the news there were two winners. He and Constance had won the combined US$997,400 jackpot. (The odds of winning a Cash 5 jackpot are 1 in 962,598, according to North Carolina Lottery officials.)
“When he got home, he showed me the ticket and pulled up the winning numbers on his phone,” Constance, a former administrative assistant for the US Army, said in a statement. She started crying.
“It’s just amazing that we won this amount of money,” she said. “We can pay off our house and pay off our cars and be able to do something for our family.”
The couple claimed their prize at lottery headquarters in Raleigh on Tuesday. They each won $498,700, which is reduced to $352,830 apiece after taxes.
Luther, 55, posted on his Facebook: “Thanking God for another day (and) praying for all my family and friends that we all get the wake up call. Have a blessed day.”
