Mavis L. Wanczyk, the mother of two who won the $758 million Powerball jackpot, received additional police security, according to TMZ.
Police in her hometown of Chicopee, Massachusetts, told the gossip website that she will receive extra patrol rounds to make sure she’s safe.
Police also “think Mavis is now a magnet for leeches, crooks, and scammers who want a piece of the pie,” TMZ eloquently stated. They’re looking to see if there are people casing her home, loitering on her property, or are harassing her.
They believe that people with bad intentions will be scared away by the additional police presence.
Wanczyk, 53, is expected to take home $336 million after taxes, lottery officials said.
“I’m scared but I'll be OK,” she said during a press conference on Thursday, Aug. 24. “Last night, it was kind of like—I didn’t realize I had won,” she said at an afternoon news conference.
“I had a pipe dream, and my pipe dream finally came true,” she said while adding that she had hoped to retire from Mercy Medical Center, a place she has worked at for 32 years.
Wanczyk added that she just wants to “be alone and just be able to be me,” the Washington Post reported.
Massachusetts State Lottery officials said that Wanczyk bought five lottery tickets.
“This was a chance—a chance I had to take,” she said. “The first thing I want to do is just sit back and relax,” she also told reporters at the news conference.
Massachusetts Treasurer Deb Goldberg told The Associated Press that she offered her advice about being careful with her cash.
“A lot of people will be coming at them with all sorts of things,” Goldberg noted. “I highly encourage them to find very, very good lawyers and advisers and think very, very carefully about how they are going to manage their assets.”
She has two adult children: a daughter and a son. Reports say that her ex-husband was killed in a freak car accident last year.
MassLive.com reported that court records show Mavis and William Wanczyk had got divorced in 2012. William Wanczyk was killed in November as he was sitting at a bus stop in Amherst, Massachusetts, and a pickup truck smashed into it, killing him, AP reported. He had served as a Northampton firefighter from 1986 to 1989.
