BATON ROUGE, La. — Mary Roberts of Boyce, Louisiana, became the Louisiana Lottery's first millionaire of 2012 when she claimed a $1 million Powerball prize from the Feb. 11 drawing at Lottery headquarters on Tuesday, accompanied by her husband, Mike.
The win also marks the first $1 million "match-5" prize for the Louisiana Lottery since the Powerball game changed in January.
"I came home from the grocery store and found Mike at the computer shaking," said Roberts, "Then I saw that he was checking the winning numbers on the Lottery's website. We couldn't believe it!"
Regular Powerball and Lotto players, the Roberts have always used their kids' birthdays to choose their numbers, but the couple opted for a Quick Pick ticket for the Feb. 11 drawing, meaning the numbers were randomly generated by the Lottery's system.
The winning ticket matched all five white ball numbers, but missed the red Powerball number, to win $1 million. The Boyce couple received $700,000 after state and federal taxes were withheld. The winning numbers were 01-10-37-52-57 and the Powerball number was 11.
Mike Roberts said his first order of business is to purchase his wife her dream car, a Mustang convertible. The self-proclaimed "ordinary" couple said they plan to use their winnings to move closer to their children in Shreveport.
The couple purchased the winning ticket at Super 1 Foods #601 on MacArthur Drive in Alexandria. The store will receive a bonus of $10,000, which is 1 percent of the prize, for selling the Roberts' their winning ticket.
The Powerball game underwent several enhancements last month to create bigger jackpots, more millionaires and better odds of winning. In addition to a price increase to $2 per play, the game's "match-5" prize quadrupled from $200,000 to $1 million.
Um hello, I am "ordinary" too!
Lol awesome story and LOL @ Mike shaking, on the computer. WTG couple!
The second prize for Powerball is now a game changer for most people. Used to be with the old second prize of $200K you could pay off some bills, get a sweet ride throw some green towards family & friends; but for most people could still not consider retirement.
$1,000,000.00 is serious money, and if invested wisely, it could lead to a nice "happily Ever After" lifestyle.
Hey New York, just noticed were both up to 322 posts.
Whoops, now I'm 323 with last post and 324 with this one.
So many posts...so little time.
Congratulations to the " Ordinary" couple..!
That picture just makes me smile. What a nice win for these people.
I hope one day dozens of people win the second prize like they did a few years ago when they used numbers from Wonton fortune cookies. It will be interesting because now all the second prizes win a cool $1M. It'll happen in time.
I'm pretty sure there is a provision in place for that scenario in the Powerball legal disclaimer. There is a "cap" as to how many of these millionaires can be paid in one drawing before exhausting the standard reserve amounts sitting in their bank accounts.
I remember that "fortune cookie" incident from 2005, it was hilarious. They immediately suspected some type of fraud or tampering with the lotto system. I believe this occurred in upper state NY.
so u agree that their is some rigging going on.
No it's not "rigging", it's a standard legal clause that every lottery has in place to protect the integrity of the game. If thousands of people were to score the second prize in one Powerball drawing, there would literally be no funds available to pay all claimants.
This has nothing to do with "rigging" anything.
I know. I was just kick in your stones from our little debate from yesterday.lol. good luck on BP tonight.
No problem kyok....we can all use a good swift kick from time to time. Keeps thing fresh and in the open. With your Karate skills, I'm sure it would be a real nice kick to!
Good luck to you as well my friend.
Slap on the face of all conspiracy theorists. Hopefully the jackpot winner is also ordinary American.