Two Will Split Lotto Jackpot of $24.7 Million

The holders of two winning tickets will split $24.7 million--the largest jackpot ever in the Lotto 6/49 game. Tickets purchased in Long Beach and the Sacramento County town of Carmichael had six of six winning numbers and are worth $12,382,211 each, lottery spokesman John Schade said Sunday.

The top jackpot was $24,764,422, the largest since the computerized numbers game in the California Lottery began in October, 1986, Schade said.

The winning tickets were bought at Terra’s Grocery, 8240 Fair Oaks Blvd., Carmichael, and a 7-Eleven store at 5103 Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach.

The winners’ identities won’t be known until they redeem their tickets.

But one man who claimed to be a winner, a Carmichael resident, called Terra’s Grocery on Sunday afternoon for instructions on how to collect the fortune, clerk Jeanne Sarot said.

‘Sounded Very Calm’

“He sounded very calm,” she said.

Sarot said the small grocery store sold 2,619 tickets Saturday, its largest single-day total.

No one had contacted the 7-Eleven store in Long Beach to ask about the prize, a store spokeswoman said Sunday.

Hundreds of thousands of other ticket-holders won a share of the total prize pool of $31,237,162, which was another record, Schade said.

The huge jackpot drew ticket sales to a weekly record of about 31.3 million, Schade said.

“We had a large jackpot, that was the main thing” influencing sales, he said.

Eight tickets had five of the six winning numbers plus the bonus number and were worth $278,246 each, Schade said. They were bought in San Jose, Pasadena, Anaheim, Glendora, El Toro, San Diego and Ocean Beach.

Another 306 tickets with five of the six numbers were worth $3,185 each, while $47 tickets with four of the six numbers were held by 21,996 people. There were also 413,272 tickets with three of the six winning numbers. They were worth $5 each, Schade said.

Here are the winning numbers picked Saturday night for the California Lottery’s twice-weekly Lotto 6/49 game: 26, 42, 4, 32, 22, 9 and the bonus number 15.

Lotto information box, Part II, Page 4.