Saturday morning started out normally for Jo Anne LaCasse of Meridian with a trip to the Idaho Center Chevron for her husband to buy Powerball tickets for the draw that night.
“My husband told me I’d have about $15 left over, so he said to get a few Scratch tickets for myself,” said Jo Anne. “I didn’t know what to get. So I just picked three of the Super 7s game.”
“I scratched them. One didn’t win. One won $20. And then the third one, I thought it was maybe a $700 winner,” described Jo Anne. “I put my glasses on and looked at it and then told my husband I thought I’d won $700. He looked at it and told me there was a comma in there and that I’d won $70,000. So, I put on a different pair of glasses and looked again. He was right!”
Jo Anne is not the first LaCasse to visit the Idaho Lottery’s winner’s lobby in the past few months. On Thanksgiving, her son Brian won the Weekly Grand jackpot. The actual prize on Weekly Grand is $77,381, which after withholding is removed, pays a player $1,000 a week every week for a year. She claimed her prize on Monday and brought her son Brian with her.
Self-admittedly, Jo Anne still didn’t believe she had won, even after receiving her real check. “Believe it, Mom. It’s real,” said Brian.
The only question now is which member of the LaCasse family will win a $70,000 prize next?
