VIRGINIA — A Maryland man stopped in Virginia to get his Powerball ticket and wound up being a million dollar winner.
Lawrence “Larry” Elpiner lives in Bethesda, but bought his ticket in Virginia because of an oncoming storm.
“I like to grab an Easy Pick ticket every now and then,” he said. “The jackpot was big that night, and I was working in Virginia as a storm was about to roll in. I figured if I didn’t buy my ticket right then, I probably wouldn’t want to get out of the car in a storm once I was closer to home.”
Mr. Elpiner decided to purchase a ticket from a 7-11 on 4223 North Fairfax Drive in Arlington.
“Though I was up late working that night, I didn’t watch the drawing,” he said. “I checked on the website later and it looked like the kind of matched, but I thought it was a joke. Then I realized that I had typed my own ticket numbers in and the match came up, so it must be real.”
It was about 1:30 a.m. when Elpiner woke his wife to check the ticket.
“My wife and I have had a long-running joke where she’s always told me to bring home a winning lottery ticket,” he said. “I can now say that I’ve checked something off of my to-do list!”.
Elpiner purchased that winning ticket with $10 he’d won from his mother in a recent bet.
The winning numbers for the Wednesday, July 27 drawing were 10-47-50-65-68, and the Powerball number was 24. The jackpot was an estimated $422 million, which no one won.
The jackpot was an estimated $422 million, which no one won. Elpiner’s ticket was just one of four nationwide to win the $1 million prize, and the only in Virginia.
Elpiner says he and his wife intend to be very wise with their win.
“We’ll share with family and friends, but we will also save and make it grow,” he says. The IT contractor says he wants to invest to have some for retirement, and to make sure that his daughter comes out of college debt-free.
