Man gets out of traffic chaos by stopping for NJ lottery ticket — and wins big
A New Jersey man turned a potentially heated moment on the road into a blissful one.
Traffic came to a halt as the man was running errands in Essex County, Tuesday, June 3, New Jersey Lottery officials said in a June 10 news release.
“There was a car stopped there,” the man told lottery officials
As he waited, the man said he honked his car’s horn.
However, he said the driver “just sat there” on the South Orange road.
The man said he could feel the driver’s eyes glaring at him.
“I did not want the drama, so I decided to pull into the (7-Eleven) that was right there,” the man told lottery officials. “I said to myself ‘Let me go get a lottery ticket.’”
The player brought three tickets: a “Pick-3, a Pick-4 and a $30 Colossal Crossword Scratch-Off,” according to lottery officials.
While his two draw games scored him $100, his scratch-off ticket came with an even bigger win, lottery officials said.
He scratched his ticket but “couldn’t see the words at first.”
“Then I saw I got, three…four and kept going,” he said in the release. “When I got to seven, I couldn’t breathe.”
In disbelief over his “top-prize winning 10 words,” the man used his phone to scan his ticket.
“That is when reality set in,” lottery officials said.
He won the game’s top prize of $600,000.
“I’m thankful to the person that caused me to stop,” the winner said. “In chaos, there’s a blessing.”
While the player has won a few prizes in the past few months, including $5,000, $1,000 and $700, this kind of lottery score is a first, officials said.
“Maybe six months ago, I had a dream that I was going to win in the Colossal Crossword. So I started buying that,” he told lottery officials. “But, if it hadn’t been for that other car, I wouldn’t have stopped.”
The man told lottery officials he will use his winnings to pay down his debt and help his children.
South Orange is about a 10-mile drive northwest from Newark.
