When Hollister resident Maria Robles bought a California Lottery
Scratcher ticket earlier this month she didn’t expect it to be
worth the paper it was printed on.
Hollister – When Hollister resident Maria Robles bought a California Lottery Scratcher ticket earlier this month she didn’t expect it to be worth the paper it was printed on.
“I never win anything,” she said. “Not even a dollar.”
But when Robles, 44, took home the ticket, which she bought at a local grocery store in Hollister, and began to scratch it off, she immediately saw that she had a winner. At first she thought it was $10, but a little more scratching revealed she had won $10,000.
Robles, married with four kids living at home, was surprised and ecstatic, jumping around her home as her 8-year-old son tried to calm her to figure out what the excitement was about.
” ‘Oh my God,’ I started yelling,” Robles recalled. “My whole body was wobbling, like when you open gelatin. That’s how I felt. My legs were really wobbling.”
Robles, who has lived in Hollister for a decade, immediately called her husband at work and told him about the winning ticket.
“He told me to control myself or I was going to faint,” she said.
In addition to their 8-year-old, Robles and her husband also have a 2-year-old daughter, a 14-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter living at home.
The $10,000 will be enough to help the couple cover the cost of some of their daughter’s college expenses, do some house improvements and pay off some debt.
“That’s a good help,” said Robles, an employee at the Milgard Windows plant in Hollister.
While $10,000 is, by no means, a fortune, it is the highest amount a person can win on a Scratcher ticket, according to California Lottery spokeswoman Catherine Doyle Johnston, which makes Robles pretty lucky.
“It’s top prize for a Scratcher,” she said. “The odds are higher (against winning).”
Once her excitement was manageable, Robles went back to the store where she was told that she would have to get the ticket to California Lottery headquarters in Sacramento to claim her winnings. Rather than trust her precious ticket to the U.S. Postal Service, Robles drove to the state Capitol the next day. She said that lottery employees told her that she will receive a check – minus $2,500 in federal income tax – within the next two months.
“That’s okay,” Robles said. “I’m waiting for it.”
Now that she’s been lucky once, Robles said she’ll probably start playing more often.
