Winning Powerball Ticket Sold In North Texas
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PRINCETON (CBSDFW.COM/AP) - There's a Powerball winner in North Texas.
One of three winning Powerball tickets was sold at a store located in the Collin County city of Princeton, lottery officials announced early Thursday. The ticket was purchased at the Appletree Food Mart, a Valero gas station and convenience store located along U.S. Highway 380, not far form Princeton High School.
Chandra Siwakoti owns the Appletree Food Mart, and opened the store on Thursday morning not even knowing that a winner came from his location. "Still can not believe," he said. "Exciting for me!" Siwakoti and his store also receive $1 million for selling the winning ticket.
The shop owner is from Nepal and has been in business for 10 years. He has no idea who the lucky person is, but a sign on the Appletree Food Mart's front window indicates that a Texas Lottery winner has come from this store before.
That previous winner was John Martin, who took home $50,000 from a scratch-off ticket back in December 2007. He also stopped by the Appletree Food Mart on Thursday morning. Some of the store's regular customers thought that he might have been a big winner again. "My phone has been ringing," Martin said. "Everybody thinks I hit it because I buy so many tickets here."
"It's exciting," Martin added. "Somebody is happy this morning."
The Texas ticket joins others sold in North Carolina and Puerto Rico as the only winners in the $564.1 million jackpot.
In addition, the Texas Lottery said that there were $1 million winners at a Chevron gas station off of Bridgewood Drive in Fort Worth and at a RaceTrac gas station along Euless Boulevard in Euless.
It had been nearly a year since a Powerball prize reached the giant number which people have come to expect recently. That was last February, when someone won $425.3 million.
Wednesday's jackpot was the third-largest one in Powerball history and the fifth-largest U.S. lottery prize. The last time a Powerball jackpot climbed so high was May 2013 when a Florida ticket won a $590.5 million prize.
Should the winners select the lump sum option, each would get a one-third share of $381,138,450.16 before taxes. The other option is an annuity, under which the lottery would make payments 30 times over 29 years.
The winning numbers in Wednesday's drawing were: 11, 13, 25, 39, 54 and the Powerball 19.
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