Anaheim Woman Shares $46-Million Super Lotto Prize

A 41-year-old food packer from Anaheim was one of two people to pick the winning numbers in the latest Super Lotto game, splitting a jackpot of $46.56 million, lottery officials said Monday.

Heredia Maria Rodriguez will share the windfall--seventh largest in the state lottery’s history--with a Northridge woman, said lottery spokesman Bob Taylor in Sacramento.

Rodriguez, who learned she held a winning ticket on Sunday morning, claimed her prize at the lottery’s district office in Sacramento on Monday, Taylor said.

Rodriguez and Caroline Tio, 22, will each receive $1,164,000, before taxes, each year for 20 years, lottery officials said.

Rodriguez bought her winning $5 lottery ticket at a Bell liquor store last week and chose her winning numbers--2, 16, 26, 37, 42 and 45--using special family dates, such as birthdays and anniversaries, Taylor said.

Her secret to winning, she told lottery officials, is to buy tickets in different cities and in different stores.

Rodriguez and her husband, Roberto, 45, told lottery officials they plan to start their own business.

The other Super Lotto winner, Tio, is a former lab technician who hopes to go to medical school.

Monday was to be Tio’s first day of full-time studying for pre-med exams, but instead she held a downtown news conference to tell a crush of reporters that, yes, she’s grateful for the windfall but it doesn’t really change her plans much.

“The money is great,” she said, giggling. “But it’s not going to deter me from my goals. . . . I still have my life in front of me.”

Tio, a 1991 graduate of UC Berkeley’s architecture school and an infrequent lottery player, said she plans to take the Medical College Admissions Test this fall and join her older sister in studying medicine.

She wants to be a pediatrician or an obstetrician. “Something with kids,” she said.

Winning the lottery has not seduced her into abandoning that goal. “Just because you don’t have to work for the rest of your life doesn’t mean that there aren’t things you want to do,” she said. “Some people think doctors are in it just for the money.”

The yearly installments could not have come at a better time. “I was unemployed and didn’t know what I was going to do” while concentrating on studying, said Tio, who moved to California from her native Indonesia in 1979.

Other than that, she was reluctant to reveal many details of her life.

On a lark, she went to the Alpha Beta supermarket on Rinaldi Street in Northridge about 45 minutes before last Wednesday’s drawing and bought $5 worth of tickets, all numbers she picked at random.

One set was a winner, but Tio didn’t realize she had won until the next day at lunch when one of her friends mentioned that a winning ticket had been bought in Northridge. “I said: ‘Maybe it’s me.’ So I pulled it out and it was.”