Jackpot lottery ticket: dying man's final gift
Posted: 6/1/2005 7:12:00 PM
A woman who bought a lottery ticket at the urging of her dying father won almost $1 million the day he passed away.
Yolanda Williams won the $979,440 prize after her father, Frank Reppa, sent her from his hospital room May 24 to go to a convenience store and buy a ticket. The two had always bought lottery tickets together.
"My father gave this to me," said Williams, 50, a retired custodian for the St. James City post office in Lee County on the Gulf Coast. 'It is a blessing and a gift."
Williams turned in a Mega Money ticket bearing the numbers 18-21-34-43 and the Megaball 20, to lottery officials Tuesday in Tallahassee. She took her winnings in a one-time lump sum, rather than $1.3 million spread over 20 years.
Williams said she took on the job of caring for her ailing father six years ago. Williams and Reppa, 79, played the Florida lottery almost every day — sometimes they would spend a dollar or sometimes $10 on the game, she said.
"I shop all over for tickets," Williams said. 'I'm a gambler and he's a gambler. If we had $100 in our pockets, we'd buy a hundred tickets, scratch-offs, lottery, whatever."
Williams and her husband, Sherman, a disabled commercial fisherman, have five children and five grandchildren.
Neighbor Tom Desantis, 37, said the family has struggled in the five years he has known them.
"They always had it hard," he said. 'You do what you can do to get by."
Now Williams and her husband are considering buying 140 acres in north Florida and paying off some of her father's bills with the winnings.
"This gave my father dignity at his funeral," Williams said. 'May my father rest in peace."
Bokeelia is located at the north end of Pine Island in the Gulf of Mexico, just west of Cape Coral.
Source: AP
