Winning $50,000 ticket sold in Lawrence

Someone who bought a Powerball Lottery ticket in the Five Towns is now $50,000 richer, according to the New York State Gaming Commission. The ticket was purchased at Tobacco Road on Rockaway Turnpike in Lawrence before the drawing on Jan. 13.
In the $1.58 billion Powerball jackpot, the largest in U.S. history, players on Long Island won millions of dollars with 19 winning tickets ranging from $50,000 to $1 million, said Gardner Gurney, director of the Division of the Lottery.
“While no one hit the jackpot prize, New Yorkers are vastly richer thanks to [the] historic Powerball drawing,” he said in a media release. “From Montauk Point to Niagara Falls and from Plattsburgh to Jamestown, two million prizes totaling over $18.8 million dollars were won in New York.”
The lottery game was so popular that Dee Virani, a cashier at Tobacco Road, couldn’t even count the amount of people who came to the store to buy numbers, except to say that she noticed more groups of people than individuals playing.
“It felt like Christmas,” she said of the energy in her store. “Everyone who came in talked about how they’d spend the money if they won. We were all very excited about it. Every day, we had so many people in here buying tickets. It was a lot of groups of coworkers who played together.”

Those standing on line to buy their tickets were peaceful, despite the volume of traffic, Virani said. “The Powerball was big over our other lottery games,” she said. “Since we have four machines here at the counter plus seven in another room, we had that plus extra help to accommodate all our customers. We also had tables and cards with pencils set up to allow more people to play.”
Unfortunately, Virani doesn’t know who the $50,000 winner is. “No one has come forward yet,” she said. “We sold a lot of tickets and don’t know if it has been claimed yet or not.”
The process is that the winner claims the prize at a Customer Service Center statewide, such as the Long Island office at 45 South Service Road in Plainview or at the Resorts World Casino New York City in Jamaica, Queens.
Virani said she was excited about the store having sold a winning ticket. “It’s fun to sell dreams to people,” she said.