Winner, winner, chicken dinner – literally.
A Virginia man recently went to the grocery store to pick up some chicken – and came back half a million dollars richer.
Russell Gomes, of South Boston, Virginia, went to the Food Lion grocery store recently to buy chicken, he told the Virginia Lottery's website.
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South Boston is located in southern Virginia, about 20 miles north of the North Carolina border.
While he was shopping, he decided to buy a scratch-off ticket – specifically, the Virginia Lottery's "Magnificent 7s" scratcher.
Gomes, a tractor-trailer driver, went to scratch off his ticket in the store's parking lot – and got the surprise of a lifetime.
"I really didn’t believe it!" he told Lottery officials when he redeemed his winning ticket on May 3. "It feels great!
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Gomes told the Virginia Lottery that he plans on using his winnings to pay off a vacation that he had already scheduled.
Magnificent 7s, the game Gomes played, has prizes ranging from $20 to $500,000, said the Virginia Lottery.
There are two additional $500,000 top prizes that have not been claimed, they said.
The Virginia Lottery was established in 1987, after Virginians voted in favor of creating a state-operated lottery.
The first tickets were sold the following year, said the Virginia Lottery's website.
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Since 1999, the Virginia Lottery's profits have supported K-12 public education in the commonwealth, said its website.
In 2023, this amounted to more than $867 million that went to public education in the state.
This was about 10% of the commonwealth's budget for K-12 schools, said the Virginia Lottery's website.
These funds are distributed throughout Virginia's counties.
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Gomes lives in Halifax County, noted the Virginia Lottery's website, which received "more than $4.4 million in Lottery funds for K-12 education last fiscal year."
During the 2023 fiscal year, the Virginia Lottery had sales of $4.6 billion.
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Of those sales, more than $3.5 billion was distributed to lottery winners and the retailers who sold the winning tickets, said the lottery's website.
