A Crawford woman won the final $50,000 top prize in the Nebraska Lottery’s Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer scratch game – and she didn’t even buy a ticket.
That’s because the ticket was a Christmas present to Linda Garey from one of her grandsons, who bought it at a Lincoln convenience store before heading out to Crawford for the family holiday celebration.
After scratching the ticket, Garey and her grandson went to a local gas station to make sure it really was a winner. Her grandkids later helped her make the 450-mile trip to Lottery headquarters in Lincoln to cash it.
In Lincoln, Garey said she plays the Nebraska Lottery regularly, but had never won anything close to $50,000 before – adding while looking at her grandson that Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer seems “an appropriate ticket.”
The $5 Scratch game had prizes from a free ticket to $50,000. The chances of winning the big prize were 1-in-104,000 with the odds of getting any prizes better than 1-in.4
The state’s share of proceeds from the Nebraska Lottery help a variety of programs and projects, raising over $855-million dollars since it began in 1993 and funding projects in all 93 counties.
Congratulations, Linda – from the writer of the song.