A lucky accident leads to a winning ticket

Imagine getting the wrong product from a store you visit often.

That’s what happened to Russell Proffit this weekend. Only when he returned to The Humidor to exchange his snuff he bought a couple lottery tickets as well. The Lucky Playbook that Proffit purchased gave him a $500,000 payday or $355,000 after the 29% state and federal tax.

"We gave him the wrong cans of snuff, and he left," said Owner of The Humidor, Sharon Mirra. "Then he realized it was the wrong ones, so he came back in and we gave him the right cans of snuff, and he’s like well give me a $20 ticket… So he bought the playbook and that was the $500,000 winner. But had he not come back to change out, if we hadn’t given him the wrong snuff, he would not have bought the ticket."

For selling a top price winning ticket, Sharon and Travis Mirra in Newark will receive a $5,000 agent fee from the state lottery. Travis is excited to have sold a winner. Especially after the circumstances leading up to it.

"He wasn’t hostile. He just said ‘hey, you got the wrong snuff,’ [ I ] looked at the two cans and they’re almost, they’re identical," said Travis. "You just have to read one little fine print, and we changed his out for him, and he asked me what kind of $20 tickets I had."

The couple has sold several big ticket winners in the past but nothing as large as this one.