Julie Leach, Fiberglass Factory Employee, Wins $310.5 Million Powerball
A fiberglass factory employee in Michigan is $310.5 million richer — which is rich enough, she has decided, to quit her job.
Julie Leach, 50, was working an overnight shift at Aquatic Bathware as a supervisor on what she called a "nasty, dirty job" when she found out while on a break at McDonald's that she had won last Wednesday's Powerball drawing.
"I quit automatically. I was done," she said, laughing, at a news conference Tuesday.
Leach purchased the winning ticket at a Shell gas station in her hometown of Three Rivers — a community in southwestern Michigan about 30 miles south of Kalamazoo — along with a cup of coffee around 6:30 p.m. She then headed into her job at the factory, where she has worked for almost 23 years.
She said she was "having a really bad night at work" before she stepped out and checked her ticket.
It was over a Cheeseburger Value Meal that Leach compared her ticket to the winning numbers, looking in disbelief as each number matched up, she told NBC's Kevin Tibbles after the press conference.
When she later found out she was the only winner, "I started shaking."
Holding the oversized check from the Michigan Lottery, she said: "It's crazy. Just unreal."
Leach regularly buys about 20 dollars' worth of lottery tickets, nabbing extra tickets when the pot gets really large. She said she also participates in a lottery pool at work.
But she "never thought it would happen" — that she would actually win.
The winning numbers were 21, 39, 40, 55 and 59, with a Powerball of 17.
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