SACRAMENTO – Monica Gonzalez, a homemaker from the Los Angeles area, recently came forward as the lucky winner of the $27 million SuperLOTTO Plus® jackpot from Wednesday, June 6, 2007!
Gonzalez had bought a ticket for the June 6 draw, but hadn’t yet checked her numbers when her father told her that the winner was from Westwood Chevron. She had needed gas that Wednesday morning and had been thinking about the numbers she wanted to pick for SuperLOTTO Plus. “When I went to play my numbers, 55 wasn’t a choice, so I substituted another number and I bought a QuickPick too. The QuickPick was the one that won,” explained Gonzalez. When she realized she’d won, Gonzalez called her husband at work to tell him she had some amazing news and to come home right away. Arriving home, Mr. Gonzalez wasn’t expecting quite the surprise that awaited him, “I thought she was pregnant, so when she told me about winning the Lottery, I was really shocked.”
The Gonzalez family is a close-knit one. “We are a humble family and we have worked hard all our lives. Now that we’ve won, our family has won too,” said Gonzalez.
The winners chose the cash option and will receive approximately $13.5 million (before federal tax withholding). While it is unclear exactly what the Gonzalez family will do with their prize, Mrs. Gonzalez says, “We plan on being good with it and making sure it’s there for our entire family.”
Wednesday night’s winning combination of 8, 16, 17, 27, 31 and the MEGA number 6 was sold at Westwood Chevron in Los Angeles. The winning retailer location is located at 10815 National Blvd. in Los Angeles, CA. The retailer will receive a bonus of $135,000 for selling the winning ticket.
The California Lottery contributes at least 34 cents of every dollar that players spend on Lottery products to public education. The Lottery contributed $1.28 billion to public education in 2005-06 out of sales of $3.58 billion, the sixth year in a row the Lottery has provided more than $1 billion in supplemental funding for education. Retailers won too, earning over $252 million in compensation last year selling Lottery products. Since its inception in 1985, the Lottery has contributed more than $18 billion to California schools.