Woman and her 7 adult children win $429.6 million jackpot Powerball with numbers one of them dreamt
Woman and her 7 adult children win $429.6 million jackpot Powerball with numbers one of them dreamt
Eight family members won last weekend’s $429.6million Powerball jackpot after the lucky numbers came to one of them in a dream.
The winners, who invested just $6 to win the top prize, have been revealed as Pearlie Smith and her seven adult children, Valerie Arthur, Marsha, Jacqueline, Tracy, Rene, Katherine and Steven.
Oldest daughter Valerie, who served as spokeswoman for the Smith family at a press conference on Friday, said: ‘Our mother bought the ticket for us. We all pooled our money together and we left it in her hands.’
Valerie said: ‘Divine intervention gave us the numbers.’
‘No birthdays, no anniversary dates,’ she said.
She said the numbers came from a dream one of the family members had.
‘We live in different cities,’ she revealed.
Valerie is a retired prison administrator, and said she spent 27 years working for the Department of Corrections.
She said: ‘I know that everyone in the Department of Corrections will be calling me.’
They plan to tithe 10 per cent of the money to their church.
Valerie said of her sister Kathy: ‘It has always been her dream to do a mentoring program for young women.
‘And she has been doing that for the last 15 years and it has been a struggle to get funding.
‘And now, she has her own funding, where she can help these young ladies at risk.’
They have hired attorneys to help them with the money and will take a trip to the usual family spot, though they wouldn’t say where that was. Valerie said she wasn’t going on the trip.
‘I just want you to know that anything can happen in New Jersey,’ she said.
The trip to claiming the jackpot began last week at a 7-Eleven in Trenton when two $2 tickets were bought, one each for drawings held last Wednesday and Saturday, and an extra $1 was spent on each ticket to get the ‘Power Play’ option that multiplies the winnings.
The lower lump sum option was chosen over the higher-valued annuity, making Saturday’s sole winning ticket worth $284 million before taxes.
‘They spent $6 to win $284 million. That’s a pretty good investment,’ Carole Hedinger, the New Jersey Lottery’s executive director, said earlier this week.
Most of the convenience store’s customers are locals, who come in a few times a week to buy coffee or a soda and maybe a sandwich or snack.
That led area residents to speculate that the person who holds the winning ticket may be living among them.
The ticket is the largest single jackpot winning ticket sold in New Jersey and the sixth-largest in Powerball history.
The winning numbers were 5-25-26-44-66, and the Powerball number was 9.
Powerball is played in 44 states plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
