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[h=4]Three hit $564M Powerball jackpot; many others enriched[/h]Winning tickets were sold in Texas, North Carolina and Puerto Rico.
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Winning tickets have been drawn for the third-largest Powerball prize ever. The tickets were sold in North Carolina, Texas and Puerto Rico and the winners could walk away with a cool $381 million each, before taxes. VPC
Customers line up to purchase Powerball lottery tickets at a 7-Eleven store on Feb.11, 2015, in Chicago.(Photo: Scott Olson, Getty Images)
Chandra Siwakoti has had a brush with a very, very rich person. And he just got wealthy himself.
Siwakoti owns the Appletree Food Mart in tiny Princeton, Texas, population 7,700. One of the three winning tickets that will split Wednesday night's $564.1 million jackpot was sold at Siwakoti's store, Texas lottery officials said Thursday.
Selling that ticket means a $1 million bonus for Siwakoti.
"I want to help my family," he told USA TODAY. "I have half of my family overseas in Nepal. My goal is to help those that are in a remote area of the country."
His wife, Smriti Acharya, told WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth the family will use the money to help pay for their 6-year-old son's education.
"I'm really happy, I don't know what to say. I have no words right now," she said. "My husband never takes off, he works all the time. We have to work really hard."
Winning jackpot tickets also were sold in North Carolina and Puerto Rico, lottery officials said. If the winners choose to take the lump sum option, the three would split $381,138,450.16 before taxes.
Sue Dooley, senior drawing manager 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.
Antonio Perez Lopez, assistant secretary of the Lottery of Puerto Rico, told Elnuevodia.com a winning ticket was sold at a Shell gas station in Cotto Laurel in the southern province of Ponce. Puerto Rico, like a handful of states, does not require the winner to release their identity to the public.
Station employee Laisa Rodriguez confirmed the ticket was sold there but said she did not know who bought it. She told USA TODAY she is hoping to get something from the store's own winnings.
"We don't know what we will be getting because it is the first time Puerto Rico has won the Powerball," she said. "It's wonderful. ...
North Carolina Education Lottery officials confirmed a ticket was sold in Brunswick County.
The winning numbers were: 11, 13, 25, 39, 54 and the Powerball number was 19. The three lucky winners who matched all the numbers were not the only ones profiting from Wednesday's Powerball largesse. Seventeen states reported $1 million winners, and a lucky Pennsylvanian won $2 million. In all, almost 6,000 not-quite-winning tickets worth $75 million in non-jackpot prizes were sold.
The jackpot was fattened by strong final-hours demand after a drought that had seen no winner since Nov. 29. It had been estimated at $485 million early Wednesday. A day of sensational sales pushed the final number to $564.1 million — the third-largest Powerball prize ever.
The two biggest Powerball jackpots: In May 2013, Gloria Mackenzie of Zephyrhills, Fla., won $590.5 million. And in November 2012, Matthew Good of Phoenix and Cindy and Mark Hill of Dearborn, Mo., split a $587.5 million prize.
Powerball is played in 44 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. If you live in Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada or Utah, you either must cross state lines or you're out of luck — those states don't participate. Or maybe residents there are the lucky ones — the chances of winning with a $2 ticket are about 1 in 175 million.
Contributing: WFAA-TV, Dallas-Fort Worth
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