- A 75-year-old gas station owner received $1 million for selling a winning Powerball ticket.
- Joseph Chahayed, who owns a family-run store in California, was given the check on Tuesday morning.
The 75-year-old owner of a gas station received a $1 million bonus after a Powerball ticket he sold ended up winning this week's historic $2.04 billion lottery prize.
Joseph Chahayed, who runs the family-operated store Joe's Service Center in Altadena, California, received the bonus check from lottery officials on Tuesday morning outside his gas station, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Chahayed told the outlet that he plans on sharing the windfall with his family, including his 11 grandchildren.
He's also the father-in-law of NFL nose tackle Domata Peko, according to the athlete. "My Father In-Law Sold the winning PowerBall," Peko wrote on his Instagram story on Tuesday. "Congratulations Baba."
Chahayed's son, Danny, said his father's gas station has sold winning lottery tickets before, but that they were only for prizes in the thousands, per the LA Times.
Chahayed plans to continue running Joe's Service Center, even though his son has encouraged him to retire with his bonus, the LA Times reported. The store owner moved to the US from Syria in 1980 with his wife and two children, according to CNN.
The winner of the record-breaking $2 billion grand prize has yet to come forward.
The jackpot was so big that lottery officials didn't have the correct signage available, and had to tape over signs at Joe's Service Center so they read: "billionaire made here" instead of "millionaire made here," per CNN.
Powerball operates in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, and tickets cost $2 each.
The Multi-State Lottery Association initially postponed the announcement of a winner on Monday, with the Minnesota Lottery saying its sales verification system caused a processing delay.
This week's grand prize eclipses the $1.586 billion jackpot won in January 2016 by three people who split their winnings.
The odds of winning the Powerball grand prize are 1 in 292 million. That's 19,000 times less likely than the chance of getting struck by lightning in the US, according to data from the National Weather Service.