Laid off Charlotte teacher grieving father’s death finds new hope in NC lottery ticket

A Charlotte father struggling to rebuild his life after losing his job found badly-needed hope in the form of a prize-winning North Carolina lottery ticket.

Joe Camp cashed in his Gold Rush ticket just days before Christmas, N.C. Education Lottery officials said in a release.

“I was a teacher for 20 years, a preschool teacher, and I got laid off on September 6,” Camp said in the release.

“A month after that, my dad passed away. And it put me in a dark place,” he said. “But I have a lot of friends and family that just told me to keep sticking in there, keep believing in myself.”

Camp says he recently got a job at a car dealership auto sales center, which gave him the spare cash to buy $5 scratch-off tickets Nov. 17 at the Coulwood BP on northwest Charlotte’s Belhaven Boulevard.

“I bought two tickets. I didn’t win on the first one, so I tried the second and I scratched it off, and I fell to my knees at the gas pump,” he said in the release.

Camp won a top prize of $250,000, beating odds of 1 in 1.2 million.

He claimed his money Monday at lottery headquarters in Raleigh. The cash came to $176,876 after federal and state taxes, officials said.

He says he intends to buy a home for himself and his daughter, then put the rest aside for her education.

“I want to have something for us. I never had anything, no one passed anything down, and that’s what I want to do,” he said in the release.

The $250,000 Gold Rush game, started in August, offers prizes from $5 up to seven top prizes of $250,000. Four of the top prizes have already been awarded, lottery officials say.

This story was originally published December 23, 2020 at 8:37 AM with the headline "Laid off Charlotte teacher grieving father’s death finds new hope in NC lottery ticket."