Motorcycle Accident Injury Attorneys in Rocky Mount, NC

A lottery player is in for a big windfall after hitting the jackpot in North Carolina.

The player bought a Carolina Cash 5 ticket that matched all the numbers picked in the April 18 drawing, making it worth $319,149, results show.

The winning numbers: 2-20-21-22-41.

So, where was the ticket sold?

The winner bought it at a Circle K convenience store on Sunset Avenue in Rocky Mount, a roughly 60-mile drive northeast from Raleigh, the N.C. Education Lottery wrote on its website and in an email to McClatchy News.

A lucky NC Lottery player with a Cash 5 ticket from Circle K on Sunset Avenue in Rocky Mount won a $319,149 jackpot in Friday's drawing! Congratulations! pic.twitter.com/AMlkkoZsLo

— NC Education Lottery (@nclottery) April 21, 2025

Cash 5 is a rolling jackpot game that offers tickets starting at $1. To win a jackpot prize, a player’s ticket must match all the numbers picked in a drawing.

As of 10 a.m. April 21, the lucky ticket holder hadn’t claimed the prize, lottery officials said. In North Carolina, winners of drawing games have about six months to cash in, rules show.

The Cash 5 win kicked off a lucky weekend for North Carolina lottery players. On April 19, two tickets sold in the state won big in the Powerball drawing, McClatchy News reported.

Many people can gamble or play games of chance without harm. However, for some, gambling is an addiction that can ruin lives and families.

If you or a loved one shows signs of gambling addiction, you can seek help by calling the national gambling hotline at 1-800-522-4700 or visiting the National Council on Problem Gambling website.

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. (WITN) - A Rocky Mount man was sentenced to over 18 years in prison for robbing multiple businesses.

According to the Nash County Sheriff’s Office, Friday, 23-year-old Kaleb Coppage was sentenced to 218 months in prison.

According to court documents and other information presented in court, on November 30th, 2023, Coppage entered the Dollar General at 2800 W. Raleigh Boulevard in Rocky Mount wearing a facemask. He pointed an AR-style pistol at an employee and demanded money.

After stealing more than $2,800 from the store’s safe and cash registers, officials say Coppage ran away.

A little over a week later, on December 8th, officials say Coppage entered the Circle K at 5102 Dortches Boulevard in Rocky Mount, again wearing a facemask, and pointed an AR-style pistol at an employee and demanded cash.

The employee gave Coppage around $60 in a shopping bag which also contained a GPS tracker. The Nash County Sheriff’s Office followed the coordinates on the tracker and found Coppage in a stolen car.

When they attempted to do a traffic stop, officials say Coppage drove away and led law enforcement on a chase that exceeded 120 mph in a 45-mph zone. Coppage ultimately hit another car and then ran away.

Law enforcement say they found the AR-style pistol, which was stolen, in the car Coppage had been driving. Upon further investigation, the sheriff’s office discovered that Coppage was on probation and monitored by an ankle bracelet. Through the ankle monitor, officers confirmed that Coppage was present at both the Dollar General and Circle K at the time of these robberies.

Upon arrest, officials say Coppage admitted to the robberies and admitted that he stole the vehicle in which he fled from the Circle K. Nash County officials say Coppage pled guilty to the charges on September 30th, 2024.

“Violently robbing our places of business terrorizes our communities and is a serious federal offense with significant consequences,” Acting United States Attorney Daniel P. Bubar stated Friday. “Today’s sentence demonstrates that we will continue to work tirelessly with our partners to stamp out gun violence.”

Copyright 2025 WITN. All rights reserved.

More than 12 people were injured when the storm slammed our region back in September.

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. (WTVD) -- Today marks six months after a devastating tornado tore through Rocky Mount causing major damage.

More than 12 people were injured when the storm slammed our region back in September.

Six months later and business owners are trying to rebuild, others have relocated.

ABC11 stopped by Pretty Essentials, a women's boutique that supports breast cancer survivors.

The owner, Keisha Justice, was inside the building when the powerful tornado touched down.

The storm and the damage to the boutique forced her to shut down her business for three months, eventually finding a temporary space.

Now she is preparing to move back into her boutique space.

ABC11 was with her as she saw the renovations to the building.

"This is my very first time being back in the building. Everything looks so fresh. Everything looks very fresh and ready to reenter into the building. But yeah, this is exciting because it is my very first time being back into what I call home," Justice said.

She plans to move back into her original space in a few weeks.

Rocky Mount Interim City Manager Peter Varney said the tornado was a "surprise and devastating" but added that if there was a silver lining, it was the quick response of emergency crews, who also faced a similar catastrophe last year when a tornado destroyed a large Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in Nash County.

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More than 12 people were injured when the storm slammed our region back in September.

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. (WTVD) -- It's been six months since an EF-3 tornado touched down in Rocky Mount and destroyed a number of businesses on or around US-301.

Glass and cinderblock that were tossed are lodged in the ground, the Hing Ta Restaurant is fenced off and boarded up, and an auto repair shop and medical supply building have both been leveled.

There's no word on what comes next for the business, but there is progress in other nearby areas.

Work at a dental office just started this past Monday.

"It's been a lot of waiting," said Chris Long of Long Home Repair. "We've been working with the bank on this one for six months now. We were actually getting ready to just start doing a renovation on this property when the tornado came through, and we had to start all over again."

On that day, Long was working on another job in Rocky Mount as the winds started kicking up, and soon, the tornado touched down right near where he was working.

"I was worried to death about that one. I wasn't even thinking about this one," said Long.

ALSO SEE: Sheriff's deputy saves family & dog from Selma home destroyed by fire

Repairs are also nearly finished at a shopping center.

Small businesses are excited to reopen their doors in a few weeks after living through the storm and dealing with the financial setback.

"Those four months that I did not have, it was hard for me," said Pretty Essential Owner Keisha Justice.

The Rocky Mount community has experienced two back-to-back tornadoes. The first one hit the Pzifer plant in 2023.

The City said in both cases, crews responded quickly, and residents did their part to uplift those suffering.

"I don't know what it's like anywhere else, but my experience in this place is a very generous people with people with big hearts and willing to open up their pocketbooks and their churches and their spaces to try to help other people in need," said Rocky Mount City Manager Petery Varney.

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Over the past six months or so, we’ve been reporting steadily on the growth and proliferation of what are known as ‘split bracket’ events on regional tours and independent tournaments. In all of that reporting, you may have noticed that when tournament directors split fields into ‘High’ and ‘Low’ brackets, based on player ratings, the ‘Low’ side brackets tend to draw the larger number of entrants. Though we suspect that it’s true in general, we don’t know that it is, because we don’t (can’t) cover every tournament on American soil from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

Along with the ‘split bracket’ events which organize two separate tournaments, one for each bracket, with occasional, small ‘final’ brackets that combine the finalists in both brackets. Then, there are times when tours and independent events create just a single bracket for one or the other (high or low) skill levels. And here again, anecdotally, the Low bracket tournaments tend to draw the largest fields.

The ‘numbers’ seem to suggest substantial growth among competitors who are one-step-above their counterparts in the Amateur League(s), like the APA, BCA, VNEA, and NAPL. And likely to have emerged from at least one of them. This new ‘range’ of competitors has entered the field of competitive play a little spoiled from their experience with the amateur leagues, which handicaps matches, affording them ‘beads on the wire’ against higher-ranked players. They come out of these leagues hoping for the same sort of ‘leg up,’ but as this past weekend’s (March 1-2) stop on the TOP (The Open Player) Tour demonstrates, they seem to prefer playing against competitors at their own level in Open events; no ‘beads on the wire’ for anybody, but with everybody, more or less, at the same skill level.

The $500-added TOP Tour event drew 51 entrants to its ‘7 and under’ tournament at Dot’s Cue Club in Rocky Mount, NC. The TOP Tour (and others) uses its own ranking system, based, in part, but not exclusively on the FargoRate system. Tour director Herman Parker has been operating his Q City 9-Ball Tour in the Mid-Atlantic/South region for over a decade (his TOP Tour has been running for the last couple of years) and has been observing the different ways that any ranking system, whether it be amateur leagues, regional tours or independent events, can be manipulated by players who ‘game the system’ to their advantage. Players have been known to deliberately play below their actual skill level over a period of time in order to reduce a given system’s assessment of that skill level. When that skill level does go down, these players suddenly show up at a tournament and are assigned more ‘beads on the wire’ in matches than they actually deserve, giving them the aforementioned ‘leg up’ in matches against actually lower skill-level competitors. Parker has ‘eyes-on’ experience with many of the players who compete on his tour(s) and prefers to ‘handicap’ them on the basis of his own personal experience and observations of their skill levels, based on competitive efforts elsewhere.

“Everybody (on this TOP Tour stop) felt like they had a chance,” said Parker.

Going undefeated to claim this past weekend’s ‘7 and under,’ TOP Tour title was a 70+-year-old competitor by the name of Jimmy Faircloth, who brought home in this one event, only $35 less than the total amount of (reported-to-us) cash at the tables in five events between 1999 and 2007, which was the last year, prior to this weekend, that he recorded (with us) any cash winnings at all. So, of course, two months and less than a week into this year, Faircloth has recorded his first event victory and it is already his best recorded earnings year.

Faircloth’s opponent in the hot seat match and finals, Wayne Hill, joined our database for the first time this weekend. He earned more as runner-up in this one event than Faircloth brought home in his first three entries; one each in ’99, ’04 and ’05. So, like Faircloth, only two months and a day or two into 2025 and it is already Hill’s best recorded earnings year.

‘Proof’s in the pudding,’ they say. The TOP Tour’s ‘7 and under’ event not only drew a respectable number of entrants, but its winner and runner-up were two relatively unknown competitors at the (more or less) same just-above-amateur-league skill levels. Ergo, the population of regional tour competitors with skill levels either at or above amateur league levels has grown considerably over the past four or five years and players seem to prefer playing in Open tournaments, as long as they can be assured that their competition is at or close to their own skill level.

Faircloth played and won six matches against five opponents, going double hill twice, 6-3 three times and 6-2 once. He faced Robbie Crosby in a winners’ side semifinal. Hill, in the meantime, played eight matches against seven opponents. He lost his one double-hill match, and shut out two opponents. He won three matches 6-2, before winning a match 6-3 and then losing one by that score. Hill squared off against Robert West in the other winners’ side semifinal.

A pair of 6-2 wins put Faircloth and Hill into the hot seat match; Faircloth over Crosby, Hill over West. Faircloth claimed the hot seat in what was his second double-hill win.

On the loss side, Crosby came over and picked up Mickey Hall, who’d lost a second-round match to Jimmy Bird (6-2) and won six straight, including, most recently, a 6-3 win over Dustin Wiley and a re-match, 6-4 victory over Bird. West drew a rematch against Jerry Cannon, whom he’d defeated, double hill, in the second winners’ side round. Cannon won four in a row, including a 6-1 victory over Damon Kotke and a double-hill win over Dylan Lee, which led to his rematch against West.

West ended Cannon’s loss-side run with a second win against him, 6-4, as Hall eliminated Crosby 6-3. West defeated Hall 6-2 in the quarterfinals that followed, only to have his own, short loss-side run ended by Hill in the semifinals 6-3.

The double-hill hot seat match may have whetted tournament appetites for a double-hill final, possibly two of them. It did not turn out that way. There was (according to digitalpool time stamps) an hour and a half between the conclusion of that hot seat match and the conclusion of the semifinals which apparently accrued to the benefit of Faircloth. He won the opening, and what proved to be only set of the final against Hill 6-3 to claim the TOP Tour title.

TD Parker thanked the ownership and staff at Dot’s Cue Club for their hospitality, along with sponsors BarPoolTables.net, Break Time (Clemmons), TKO Custom Cues, Realty Group One Results, CHC Undeground, Digitalpool.com, Dirty South Grind Apparel, Federal Savings Bank Mortgage Division and AZBilliards.

Information about the next stop(s) on the Q City 9-Ball Tour and/or the TOP Tour, not available as we were preparing this report, will be disseminated on the tour’s Facebook page, when it is.

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