EC woman wins new car

Years of entries finally pays off

Every day for the last four years Arlene Marshall has gone on the SweepstakesToday.com Web site and entered free contests. One of the contests she entered through the site was the Ito En sweepstakes with a prize of a new Prius car.

The summer contest drew a million participants across the country, but it was Marshall, 54, of Elizabeth City, who got the winning call last month and picked up her new car on Wednesday at Toyota of Elizabeth city with smiling family and friends around her.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Marshall said of the call. “I said, ‘really?’”

Her friend Lucy Cooper said Marshall told her about winning the car the day it happened.

“If anybody needs a new car, she needs a new car,” Cooper said of Marshall, a single mother who works two jobs. “It’s a nice surprise.”

Marshall is thinking of keeping the car for herself and giving her daughter, Nettie, 18, Marshall’s Jeep to replace Nettie’s aging Chevrolet Cavalier.

“It’s a pretty big deal to me right now because my daughter really needs (a car),” Marshall said.

Marshall, an employee at the N.C. Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and Lowe’s, says she enters free contests with cash and vehicle prizes.

She hadn’t won anything beyond a few coupons before she was notified that she had won the sweepstakes at Ito En, a Japanese tea company.