Sharing the Wealth : 4 Winners Will Get $17.1-Million Slices of Record Lottery Jackpot

A 41-year-old Simi Valley woman with six children, 11 grandchildren and a host of unpaid bills will share a record $68.56-million Lotto jackpot with at least three other Southern California residents, lottery officials said Thursday.

There were four winning tickets in Wednesday night’s Lotto 6/49 drawing, each worth $17.1 million. Other winning tickets in the lottery’s largest payoff were purchased in Laguna Niguel, West Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Lydia Neufeld, an employee at a Simi Valley collection agency, said her winning ticket was one of 15 she purchased at a nearby 7-Eleven store. She said her good fortune came at a time when she was just making ends meet.

“Believe me, we have gone through some struggles,” Neufeld said as friends, relatives and television news crews descended on her home. “For a while, our house was in jeopardy and my husband was unemployed because of an accident he had at work.”

Neufeld’s husband, a plasterer, recently returned to work.

After taxes, the four winners will collect annual payments of $685,000 for 20 years, lottery officials said. Neufeld said that sum will be a considerable improvement over the $50,000 she and her husband, Dave, earned last year.

Other winners were Joan Young of Laguna Niguel and Michael Yang of Valencia, who purchased his ticket at a West Los Angeles gas station and mini-market.

Lottery officials said the holder of the fourth winning ticket, purchased at Ranch Liquor & Deli in Long Beach, had not come forward as of Thursday afternoon.

But store manager Frank McDonald said an elderly pensioner and frequent customer had come to the store with his wife to tell workers he had won. “He’s still in kind of a state of shock,” McDonald said. “He looked kind of tired. I think he’s been up all night.”

McDonald said he could not remember the man’s name. But Barbie Tizon, the store’s night manager, said the man and his wife had bought several hundred dollars worth of tickets only hours before the drawing.

In Orange County’s affluent Laguna Niguel neighborhood, a winning ticket was purchased by Young at a Circle K store.

After the numbers were announced on television Wednesday night, Young called the Circle K to check the numbers and make sure she was a winner, according to the store’s manager, Maher Altahan.

“It was a wonderful surprise,” Altahan said. “When the customer called and told me (she) had all six numbers . . . I didn’t know what to say. I was so excited.”

The winning tickets also are valuable to the four stores that sold them. Each retailer will get 0.5% of the value of the ticket sold, or more than $80,000.

Altahan said Circle K corporate officials will have the final word on what happens to the store’s winnings. “It’s up to the company,” he said. “I think some of it should be divided among the employees.”

The odds of picking all six winning numbers in the lottery are formidable--14 million to 1. But that didn’t stop Californians from lining up across the state in record numbers to buy lottery tickets.

More than 6.2 million of the $1 tickets were sold between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. Wednesday, shattering the old single-hour record of 4.5 million tickets set only two hours earlier, lottery spokesman John Schade said.

Wednesday’s ticket sales started at 5 a.m., an hour earlier than normal. When sales closed at 7:45 p.m., more than $50.5 million of Lotto tickets had been sold at a rate averaging 951 tickets a second, breaking the single-day record of $31.5 million set Oct. 29, 1988.

California’s previous jackpot record was $61.98 million on Oct. 29, 1988. Forty-eight people shared the prize, including a group of 15 San Diego County hospital workers.

Wednesday’s jackpot was the third largest in the nation and the second largest for the game of Lotto, eclipsed only by a $114-million jackpot at a keno-type lottery game in Pennsylvania and a $70-million Lotto jackpot in Illinois.

“It’s been very exciting these last few days,” lottery spokeswoman Joanne McNabb said. “It’s like working on the Olympics or a political campaign. . . . The most fun part is getting to talk to the winners.”

Neufeld, the Simi Valley winner, said she plans to retire after 27 years of working to support her family. She had her first child at age 14 and now has four daughters and two sons, the youngest of whom is 22.

“My mother-in-law is on Social Security and she needs taking care of,” Neufeld said. “I’m still in shock. I’m getting all of these phone calls and now the reality is starting to set in. I guess I’ll really believe all of this has happened when I get that first check.”

Times staff writer Shelby Grad contributed to this story.