Mavis Wanczyk used birthdays to choose some of the numbers on her winning ticket, the largest prize from a single lottery ticket in US history

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A Massachusetts hospital worker has won the largest single-ticket prize in US lottery history, a $758.7m Powerball jackpot – and immediately told her employer she wouldn’t be going back to work.

“I called and told them I will not be coming back,” Mavis Wanczyk told reporters at a news conference. “The first thing I want to do is just sit back and relax.”

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Wanczyk chose to take a lump-sum payment of $480m, or $336m after taxes, lottery officials said. Winners who take a gradual payout stand to get more money spread out over several decades.



Even after paying taxes on the winnings, Wanczyk is worth more than some small countries such as Micronesia, which has a gross domestic product of $322m, or the Pacific islands of Palau, with a GDP of $293m.

She said that the night before her win she was leaving work with a firefighter and remarked: “It’s never going to be me. It’s just a pipe dream that I’ve always had.”

Then she read the number on her ticket and realized she had won.

Wanczyk worked for 32 years in a clerical job in the nursing department at Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, the hospital said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The winning Powerball ticket was sold at the Pride Market on Montgomery Street in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Photograph: Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/EPA

About a month ago, she shared a post on Facebook joking that she needed a vacation. “And by ‘vacation,”’ the post read, “I mean I need to move away and find a new job. On a beach. With rum.”

The jackpot is the largest ever won with a single ticket. It is the second-largest US lottery prize, ahead of a $656m Mega Millions prize won by three people in 2012. But Wednesday’s big prize is still dwarfed by a $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot divvied up between three winners in January 2016.

Wanczyk has two adult children, a daughter and a son.

Massachusetts treasurer Deb Goldberg said she offered advice to the family about being careful with their new-found wealth.

“A lot of people will be coming at them with all sorts of things,” Goldberg told reporters. “I highly encourage them to find very, very good lawyers and advisers and think very, very carefully about how they are going to manage their assets.”

Wanczyk bought a total of five tickets. Two were computer-generated Powerball tickets, and three used numbers that she chose. The winning ticket, she said, was one with numbers that used family birthdays.

Her inspiration for the final digit the Powerball came from her penchant for playing the number four number every Friday in a Keno game with her mother, stepfather and a friend.

The announcement that a winner had come forward came after a turbulent morning in which lottery officials initially misidentified not only the store that sold the winning ticket, but the town.

The lottery corrected the site where the single winning ticket was sold to Chicopee, Massachusetts. Overnight, it had mistakenly announced the winning ticket was sold at a shop in Watertown, just outside Boston.

But shortly before 8am, the lottery said it had made a mistake, and that the winning ticket was sold at the Pride Station & Store in Chicopee, about halfway across the state.

Massachusetts lottery executive director Michael Sweeney said officials were manually recording the names of the retailers that sold the winning ticket and transcribed it incorrectly. Sweeney issued an apology for the confusion created by the error, but said lottery staff remained thrilled that a jackpot winning ticket and two $1 million winning tickets were sold in Massachusetts one of those at the Watertown location.

