Local News in Brief : Lotto Winner to Help Kids
A Monterey Park man who won $5.28 million in the state’s Lotto 6/49 game over the weekend said he will use some of the money to expand a college scholarship fund that he helped found last year at a local elementary school.
Up to now, the fund at the Glen Alta Elementary School was financed by the recycling of paper, bottles and cans--yielding $1,000.
But Lotto winner Leandro Vargas, 61, the owner of a Lincoln Heights garment manufacturing firm that makes girls’ uniforms for Catholic schools, said he hopes that, with the help of others, the fund will grow to between $50,000 and $70,000 over the next few years.
Vargas, who said he will remain in the same house he has lived in for three decades, will be paid $211,200 a year after taxes for 20 years.
“It was a big surprise,” he said. “I didn’t believe it at first and neither did anybody else in my family.”
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