SACRAMENTO – California Lottery winner Alicia Guzman knows exactly what she’s going to do with her $750,000 prize. She’s going to buy a home for her family. “I’m going to buy a house. That’s my big dream,” Guzman explained. The Watsonville resident has lived in the same apartment for eight years.
After Alicia Guzman won her Lottery prize, it took a while for things to sink in. “Until now, I didn’t believe it. For me, you know, it’s too much,” she said. Guzman, who works in the Deli department at Safeway, called her winning “a dream come true.”
It all started when Guzman stopped off at Lulu’s Fiesta Liquors on Freedom Boulevard in Watsonville to buy a Scratchers ticket. When she arrived home and first uncovered her prize she asked her family to check if what she saw was true. She even telephoned her older son in North Carolina to verify she’d won. They all told her the same thing. She’d won.
Guzman’s prize will be paid off over 25 years.
More than 95 cents of every Lottery dollar is returned to the community in the form of contributions to education, prizes and retail commissions. The California Lottery contributes at least 34 cents of every dollar that players spend on Lottery products to public education and returns more than 50 percent of sales to players in the form of prizes. Since its inception in 1985, the Lottery has contributed nearly $21 billion to California schools out of total sales of more than $56 billion. Retailers benefit too, earning $3.6 billion in compensation since 1985.