Lottery winner didn’t think her ‘godsend’ NC prize was real. ‘We really needed this’

Wendy Hester was in the Fairhaven Mini Mart in Leland, North Carolina, recently when she got a strange feeling about a lottery ticket.

“Something just told me to buy it, so I did,” Hester told officials, according to a March 10 news release from the North Carolina Education Lottery.

Hester took her $10 VIP Platinum ticket home and started scratching.

She didn’t believe what she saw, officials said.

“I just kept looking at it thinking, ‘This can’t be right,’” Hester said. “But it was right.”

She had won a $1 million top prize in the new scratch-off game — the first lucky person to do so, according to officials. Hester said she immediately called her husband and told him, “I just won a million dollars.”

“It was just meant to be, I think,” Hester told officials. “We really needed this.”

After taxes, Hester took home $427,503, which she plans to use to buy a new house for her family and pay off her car.

“This is a godsend,” Hester told officials. “We can finally get our home.”

Leland is about 140 miles south of Raleigh.

If you or a loved one shows signs of gambling addiction, you can seek help by calling the national gambling hotline at 1-800-522-4700 or visiting the National Council on Problem Gambling website.

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