The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Puerto Rico, N.C., Texas tickets win
$564M Powerball pot shared with 1st winner outside U.S.
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO — Somebody who stopped by a Shell station in southern Puerto Rico was potentially $100 million richer on Thursday, winning a share of a $564.1 million Powerball jackpot — the first winner outside the continental United States.
The winner, who will share the jackpot with people in North Carolina and Texas, had not yet come forward, but several Puerto Ricans who bought tickets at the station in the coastal city of Ponce have stopped by to ask about who won, said employee Yomaris Rentas.
She had just started her shift at the 24-hour station early Thursday when the lottery machine began printing a message alerting her that the winning ticket had been sold there.
“I couldn’t believe it!” she said with a laugh. “We’re celebrating.”
Neither of the other two winners had been identified either.
The winners can claim their prizes starting today, choosing between a lump sum payment of $101.6 million apiece or 30 payments over 29 years, said Antonio Perez Lopez, assistant secretary of the Puerto Rico Lottery.
“We are beyond thrilled with the news that we already have a multimilliondollar winner just four months after Puerto Rico began selling Powerball tickets,” he said.
The Texas Lottery posted on Twitter that one of the winning tickets was sold at Appletree Food Mart in Princeton, near Dallas. There was no immediate information on the city that produced the winner in North Carolina.
Besides 44 states and Washington, D.C., the game is also played in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but there has never been a jackpot winner there, said Sue Dooley, senior drawing manager and production coordinator for the Multi-State Lottery Association.
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.
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.