North Carolina, Puerto Rico, Texas Tickets Win $564 Million Powerball
DES MOINES, Iowa (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Tickets in North Carolina, Puerto Rico and Texas have matched all six numbers to split a $564.1 million Powerball jackpot, lottery officials said Thursday.
The winning numbers in Wednesday's drawing were: 11, 13, 25, 39, 54 and the Powerball 19. The jackpot now goes back to $40 million for the next drawing on Saturday.
The prize had been raised multiple times since Saturday's drawing and has been growing gradually from its $40 million starting point more than two months ago.
North Carolina, Puerto Rico, Texas Tickets Win $564 Million Powerball
Sue Dooley, senior drawing manager and production coordinator for the Multi-State Lottery Association, said the Puerto Rico ticket was the first Powerball jackpot winner ever sold outside the continental United States.
Puerto Rico joined Powerball less than a year ago. Besides 44 states and Washington, D.C., the game is also played in the Virgin Islands, but there has never been a jackpot winner there, Dooley said.
The Texas Lottery posted on Twitter early Thursday that one of the winning tickets was sold at Appletree Food Mart in Princeton, Texas. There was no immediate information on the cities or stores that produced the winners in North Carolina or Puerto Rico.
It had been nearly a year since a Powerball prize reached the giant number people have come to expect recently. That was last February, when someone won $425.3 million.
Wednesday's jackpot was the third-largest 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.
1010 WINS' Glenn Schuck returned to a 7-Eleven in Lyndhurst, New Jersey where there was so much hope Wednesday, and a lot of disappointment Thursday.
"There's the hope, I thought about it, I'm going to retire in June, it'd be nice. I don't have a lot of money now, I didn't have it then, what the hell's the difference," one man said.
"It is sad, but if you look at the history of all the Powerballs the south wins it," another man said.
The largest payout in U.S. history was to three ticketholders in the Mega Millions game, the other national lottery drawing. That was a $656 million prize won in March 2012 by players in Kansas, Illinois and Maryland.
Last month, a retired school principal claimed New York's biggest Mega Millions jackpot. Harold Diamond, 80, of Wurtsboro was the sole winner of the $326 million Mega Millions jackpot drawn on Nov. 4.
In 2012, state officials who run Powerball and Mega Millions changed ticket prices and lowered the odds of winning jackpots in hopes the moves would increase the number of huge prizes and draw more players. The new rules worked, causing jackpots to repeatedly climb to record levels. More than half of the top 10 U.S. jackpots have been reached in the past couple of years.
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