The Associated Press
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — There are just two winning tickets in the record $370 million Mega Millions jackpot — one sold in New Jersey and the other in Georgia, lottery officials announced Wednesday.
No one had come forward to claim their share of the prize at midday, but lottery officials in both states were expecting to hear from the winners soon.
One winning ticket was traced back to Campark Liquors in Woodbine, N.J., on the state’s southern end. The other was sold at Favorite Market in Dalton, Ga., lottery representatives in the two states said.
“It’s the most wonderful thing,” said Campark Liquors manager Fern Gandy. “We have so many wonderful customers here. I’m just glad it was one of them.”
California’s results were delayed until mid-day, but the Lottery finally announced that the count was complete and that the state had no tickets matching all winning numbers. The other nine states also struck out, said Mardele Cohen of the Ohio Lottery, which compiles all the states’ information.
The winning numbers: 16-22-29-39-42, with the Mega Ball 20.
The odds of hitting it: about 1 in 176 million.
In Georgia, Favorite Markets president Sam Turner told the Dalton Daily Citizen he believes someone living in his area could be the winner.
“That’s a store that’s in a heavy industrial area, so odds are it’s somebody that lives and works around there,” Turner said. “Very few people get lost on Abutment Road, so my guess is it’s a local, which from my standpoint, if that bears out, that’s wonderful.”
Tuesday night’s drawing was held in New York’s Times Square in ABC’s television studio rather than Atlanta after brisk sales pushed what had been an estimated $355 million jackpot estimate to a record $370 million.
Even though the temperature was just 16 degrees, a handful of hopefuls showed up in Times Square to watch the drawing.
Millions of others had lined up at lottery agents in the 12 states to buy tickets Tuesday. New Yorkers bought more than 1 million tickets an hour, said Robert McLaughlin, the state’s lottery director. Virginia retailers sold about 8,550 tickets per minute.
New York construction worker Andelko Kalinic had an idea of what he would do if his Mega Millions ticket paid off.
“Go to the moon,” he said. “Why not?”
Some lottery hopefuls in Ohio never had a chance. Ohio’s lottery ticket system went down statewide at about 10:20 p.m., 25 minutes before the deadline, Cohen said. The cause hadn’t yet been determined.
“For those people who wanted to make a wager and didn’t get a chance, we’re very, very sorry,” she said.
The largest previous multistate lottery jackpot was $365 million in 2006, when eight workers at a Nebraska meat processing plant hit the Powerball lotto. The Big Game lotto, the forerunner of Mega Millions, paid out a $363 million jackpot in 2000.
Mega Millions tickets are sold in California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington state.
