West Virginia Sells Winning Powerball Ticket

[Steven]

HURRICANE, W.Va. (Dec. 26) - Christmas is over for the rest of us, but for the winner of the $314.9 million Powerball jackpot it just may go on forever. It's believed to be the largest prize won by a single ticket anywhere.

It was so big that West Virginia lottery officials were relieved that the winner didn't immediately claim the prize: They didn't have enough cash on hand to pay up.=

The ticket for the Christmas night drawing was purchased Monday by a Putnam County resident at the C&L Super Serve in Hurricane, 25 miles west of Charleston, officials of the multistate lottery said. ''It's so just that the poorest state in America wins the biggest Powerball in history,'' said Bob O'Dell, a 51-year-old resident of the town that's pronounced herr' ah cun. The jackpot was believed to be the largest ever for a single winning ticket, said Nancy Bulla of the West Virginia Lottery Commission. It also was the third-largest jackpot in U.S. history. It wasn't known if the ticket had been purchased on behalf of a group of people.An unexpected Christmas Day run on Powerball tickets pushed the already whopping $280 million jackpot to $314.9 million just before numbers were drawn, making it the Powerball's largest prize ever.

The winning numbers were 5-14-16-29-53 and the Powerball was 7.

The winner, who has 180 days to claim the prize, has an option of taking a cash payout of $170 million before taxes or collecting the entire jackpot in 30 payments over 29 years.

Because of the jackpot's size, the state didn't have enough cash on hand to award the full amount on either option, Bulla said. She said several million dollars could be paid now, with another payment made in early January once funds are transferred from the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball. A man who identified himself as an attorney representing the winner contacted the West Virginia Lottery Commission on Thursday and said he would come forward at a later date, Lottery Director John Musgrave said. The man, who did not identify himself, said the winner is a resident of Putnam County, a bedroom county sandwiched between Charleston and Huntington, Musgrave said during a visit to the store. At the Super Serve early Thursday in the town of 5,200 residents, clerk Aaron Gillispie said the 24-hour grocery store and gas station was in a frenzy. ''It's a mad house,'' he said in an Associated Press Radio interview. ''Every camera crew, every news crew, every person that has anything to do with anything wants to talk to us.''Super Serve owner Larry Trogdon told NBC's ''Today'' that police called his house at 3 a.m. ''It was scary,'' he said. ''Then they told me we sold the lottery ticket for $314 million. That made me relieved. Then I had to travel 90 miles to get here.''

By selling the ticket, Trogdon gets $100,000.

''I have a daughter getting married this summer,'' he told NBC, smiling. Powerball, the nation's largest lottery game, is sold in 23 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Before the Christmas 2002 prize, the largest Powerball jackpot was $295.7 million in July 1998. The biggest lottery jackpot in U.S. history was a Big Game prize of $363 million, won in May 2000 by ticketholders in Michigan and Illinois. The second was a $331 million Big Game jackpot split between three tickets in April. Spain's annual Christmas lottery known as El Gordo - The Fat One - is billed as the world's richest. This year's $1.7 billion jackpot spreads wealth among millions of people. About 10,000 numbers win some kind of prize, from $20 to $200,000.

AP-NY-12-26-02 1107EST

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