A convenience store in Skid Row, the most troubled and poorest neighborhood in Los Angeles, is selling a billion dollar lottery prize

Convenience store a few blocks away The grade is slipperythe Los Angeles neighborhood that the United Nations compares to a refugee camp, sold its winning lottery ticket this Wednesday With a prize of $1.080 million. The winning numbers were 7-10-11-13-24 from the White Balls and No. 24 from the so-called Powerball, which is the name of the lottery. It’s the sixth-largest prize in US history and the third-largest in the genre’s history, and it was taken by someone – anonymous – who got it in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country and is probably now jumping for joy.

Las Palmas Mini Market, that’s the name of the little shop For Seven Years by Nabor Herrera. His owner did not know the news until he went to work on Thursday morning. At first he thought all the cameras there belonged to some kind of film set. “It was a complete surprise to me,” Herrera told the media. With the $1 million reward he will receive for being the seller of the winning ticket, the man, a father of four, intends to use it to go on vacation with his children to Cabo San Lucas, a beach town in Baja California Sur, in Mexico. “I also want to make the store bigger, with more products and better service for people. That’s where I am now,” said Herrera.

According to the rules governing this lottery, there is still a long time – a whole year – Find out the identity of the person who bought the winning ticket. During that time, the lottery organizers check that the person is the person deserving of the prize. “We have to spend some time looking for the winner to make sure it is [persona] Caroline Baker said during the press conference. “Integrity and transparency are very important to us.” Baker recommended that the winner consider hiring financial and legal advisors to help manage the funds. The first thing you have to decide is whether you want to take out a pre-tax payment of $558 million or the full $1.08 billion over several years.

And the jackpot, with a 1 in 292.2 million chance, is among the largest in history, reaching a stratospheric figure after going no-one last week, estimated at $900 million. The Powerball record is a $2.04 billion jackpot, drawn in November, also in California, making it the second time in less than a year that luck has made a Los Angeles County resident a billionaire thanks to the Powerball lottery. The last time someone hit the Powerball jackpot was on April 19, and it was worth about $253 million. Powerball is played in 45 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.

The narrow market in which the prize was sold is a few blocks from Skid Row, its streets lined Thousands of people sleep on the street. Nearly 12,000 people live on square kilometers of sidewalks without access to drinking water or toilets. Life expectancy here is 48 years, compared to 80 for the average Californian. The United Nations compares it to a refugee camp because of the extreme poverty in which its neighbours live. This situation reveals a larger and growing problem: The number of homeless people in Los Angeles has increased by 16%.

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The media epicenter was Herrera, but the real winner was his wife, Maria Letizia Menjivar, 50, a shopkeeper who preferred not to speak to the press, according to the newspaper. Los Angeles Times. Yes, her oldest daughter, Angelica, 35, did. At first he didn’t believe it, he told the press, so he began checking the store’s security cameras on his cell phone, seeing how more and more television camera crews arrived. “We started getting calls at 5 in the morning, we thought that was it spam emails.” This woman confirmed to be of Salvadoran descent. “We are immigrants, and our family has fought a lot to make this business a success, and this was our dream, to show that it is possible for anyone to make this happen.”

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