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July 23, 2009
 Aretha Epps of Richmond had a difficult weekend. She couldn’t sleep. She was very anxious. What was the cause of her stress? She had a Virginia Lottery ticket worth $150,000 and she was waiting for Monday morning to redeem it. The wait did have a benefit, though.
“It gave me time to think what to do with the money,” she told Lottery officials.
Ms. Epps won the top prize in the Lottery’s Dollars & Diamonds Scratcher game. She bought the ticket at 48 Hours Food Store, located at 5091 Forest Hill Avenue in Richmond. She then took the ticket home, scratched it and realized it was a big winner.
“I thought, ‘Is this really happening?’” she said. “I was crying and screaming. I called my mom.”
Dollars & Diamonds is one of dozens of Scratcher games from the Virginia Lottery. Ms. Epps is the first player to claim the game’s top prize, which means three top-prize tickets have not yet been claimed.
Nearly 95 cents of each dollar spent on the Virginia Lottery by players goes back to the Commonwealth in the form of contributions to education, prizes and retailer commissions. Since 1999, all Virginia Lottery profits have been designated solely to K-12 public school education in the Commonwealth. In that time, the Lottery has turned over more than $4 billion for Virginia’s public schools. The latest annual profits of $455 million currently represent about 6 percent of state funding for public education in Virginia. In 20 years, the Lottery has sold more than $20 billion in tickets, awarded more than $1 billion in retailer commissions and paid more than $10.9 billion in prizes to players.
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