Mark Perdue and his wife with their $50,000 lottery winnings.Photo:Kentucky Lottery
Kentucky Lottery
A Kentucky couple ended up winning a $50,000 lottery prize after finding a ticket that had been lost for months.
It all began when Mark Perdue purchased a Powerball ticket for the Oct. 30 lottery drawing at an AM Express store in Bowling Green, where he is a regular customer, according to theKentucky Lotteryofficials.
“I said, ‘For what?’” Perdue recalled, per lottery officials. “And she said, ‘You won the lottery.’ I said, ‘I wish.’ She said, ‘You did, I have you on video.’”
Then came the hard part: finding the ticket.
Perdue and his wife spent over three months searching for it and eventually assumed it was gone for good.
“I’ve been beating myself up for three months thinking I threw this ticket away,” his wife told lottery officials. “I did throw a ticket away, but it was an older ticket. Then I convinced myself maybe it was this ticket.”
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Fortunately, Perdue, who is the president of automotive supply companyKiriu USA, had luck on his side.
In early February, a manager from another plant was in town for a visit and needed a company car. And when Perdue inspected the vehicle, he saw the winning Powerball ticket in the front seat.
“I picked it up and I saw October 30th and I said, ‘That’s my ticket!’” remarked Purdue.
As for what happened, he said he believed the ticket had to have fallen out of his pocket while he had previously used the car.
“I don’t know how long it might have sat out there if I hadn’t needed the car,” he added, admitting, “I was shaking a little bit.”
Perdue then took a snap of the ticket and shared it with his wife in a text message.
Perdue isn’t the only recent lottery winner who experienced temporary lapses in memory. In February, Nebraska man Lucas Swarthout forgot about a $2 scratch-off lottery ticket that he purchased last fall andleft it in his glove compartment for three months.
“I was cleaning out my glove box,” Swarthout told Nebraska Lottery officials. “I was looking for a VIN number on my other vehicle and found the ticket in there unscratched.”
For his winning Truck$ & Buck$ ticket, which he purchased at a Kwik Stop in North Platte, Swarthout was awarded a 2023 Ford F-150 XLT 4x4 Crew Cab Flex Fuel truck worth $81,000. And as a bonus, the Nebraska Lottery would foot the taxes and registration fees for Swarthout’s new vehicle. “That just makes it better,” Frey said. “When you find out there’s no financial strings attached to it.”
source: people.com
