An unemployed Newport woman who won $1 million in a Maine State Lottery game has collected her winnings — four years after she bought the scratch ticket in a store that’s since burned down.
Brenda Ripton told the Central Maine Morning Sentinel that she had received her $700,000 check from the lottery on Thursday. Ripton had just learned two days earlier that she won the million-dollar prize in the Texas Hold ‘em game. The government took the rest of her winnings for taxes.
Ripton said both she and her husband are out of work. Her winnings came in a second-chance lottery in which non-winners fill out the back of the ticket.
It took this long to declare winners because the state had to sell all of its Texas Hold ‘em tickets first.
