Photo: Virginia Lottery

A Richmond-area woman is presumably quite happy she stopped at a Troutville convenience store just off I-81. Deborah Akers was driving home from Christiansburg when she purchased a Virginia Lottery scratcher ticket that was good for $500,000. It is one of the top prizes in the “Super 5s” game.

NEWS RELEASE: Deborah Akers was driving from Christiansburg to the Richmond area where she lives. She stopped at Brughs Mill Country Store at 345 Brughs Mill Road in Fincastle. “I had a $40 winning ticket, so I cashed it in,” she said. She used her winnings to buy four more tickets, including a Super 5s ticket. Hours later, sitting at home watching TV, she pulled out the tickets and began scratching. That’s when she discovered one of her tickets was worth $500,000. “There’s no way! There’s no way!” she later recalled thinking. “I just won half a million!”

The Glen Allen woman had just become the first top prize winner in the Super 5s game, one of dozens of Scratchers available from the Virginia Lottery. The game features prizes ranging from $10 to $500,000. The odds of winning that top prize are 1 in 652,800. The odds of winning any prize in this game are 1 in 3.38. Two more top prize tickets remain unclaimed in this game.

Ms. Akers, who is a paramedic, said she plans to pay bills with her winnings and invest the rest.