Wellman woman wins $30,000 lottery prize

A Wellman woman won a $30,000 prize from a scratch card lottery game last week.

“I usually play crosswords and I just thought, ‘Well, this is new. Let’s try something different,’” Danielle Hagist, 31, told officials on Friday as she claimed her prize at the lottery’s Cedar Rapids regional office.

Hagist won the prize in the Iowa Lottery’s “Flamingo Cash” scratch game, which began sales earlier this month. She bought her winning ticket at Freeman Foods in Wellman.

“I sat down the next morning and was just drinking a cup of coffee and scratching it, waiting for everybody else to get up,” she said. “When I scratched off the number that finished the $30,000 line, I was like, ‘Uh, OK, I did this wrong.’”

She checked and rechecked her numbers, then pulled out her phone to open the Iowa Lottery’s mobile app to scan the ticket.

“When I used my phone app, that’s when I believed it was real,” she said.

Hagist, a nurse, said she plans to save her winnings, but her daughter had other ideas.

“My daughter now thinks we’re going on a shopping spree,” she said with a laugh. “We’re going to just put it away and see what happens.”

Iowa Lottery officials said Flamingo Cash had seven top prizes of $30,000 and overall odds of 1 in 3.58.