2nd Prize in Lotto; Jackpot Carried Over : Woodland Hills Teacher Wins $679,064

A Woodland Hills woman who teaches severely handicapped high school students was identified Monday as the biggest winner in the California Lottery’s first electronic Lotto game.

“I still can’t believe it,” Carol McCoy said a few hours after lottery officials informed her that she had won the $679,064 second prize for picking five numbers out of six, plus a bonus number.

Lottery public relations director Bill Seaton said a check of all the state’s nearly 5,000 electronic terminals disclosed that no one had won the $2.4-million grand prize in the first Lotto game. That sum, he said, will be added to the top prize in the second game, which ends Saturday night.

“But $679,064 is better than a kick in the shins,” he said.

McCoy agreed.

“We just about went out the ceiling when we found out,” she said. “My husband and I didn’t watch the drawing on television Saturday night. We found the numbers in The Times the next morning--and then no one seemed to know what to do about it.

“At the 7-Eleven store where we bought the ticket, they said we had to take it to the lottery office, but they weren’t sure where the office was and it wasn’t in the phone book so it was this morning (Monday) before we found the office over in San Fernando. . . . “

“We’ll probably have a ceremony later this week to present this first check,” Seaton said. “It’s one of the largest lump-sum payments we’ve made. When you get into the millions, it comes in the form of a 20-year annuity. . . . “

McCoy, who teaches at Diane Leichman High School in Reseda, said she didn’t go to work Monday--but has no plans to quit her job.

“The money is nice,” she said. “But I enjoy what I’m doing. I work with trainable mentally retarded youngsters and I want to go right on doing that. Still, the money will sure help with a lot of things. We have two boys in college . . . and that’s expensive. . . . “

She said that she and her husband, Ray McCoy, a self-employed aerospace consultant, had been buying the scratch-off lottery tickets since the games began, but had never won more than a few dollars.

“We didn’t really expect too much with the new game,” she said. “We each spent five dollars for five different number combinations, and then just put the tickets away until Sunday, when we checked them against the newspaper. . . . “

Seaton said it was really no surprise that nobody had won the jackpot the first time around.

The odds, he pointed out, are 13,983,816 to one.

But in addition to Carol McCoy’s second-place ticket, there were 52 people who won $6,728 each for picking five of the six numbers without the bonus number, plus another 4,451 who picked four of the six numbers to win $71 apiece--and 90,405 people who won $5 for getting three of the numbers right.

And one of the smaller prize-winners was Ray McCoy.

“My husband won a prize, too,” Carol McCoy said. “He got $71 for getting four numbers right!”