Englewood man wins lottery

Author: dave culbreth
Published: Updated:

ENGLEWOOD, Fla.- If you play the Lottery, you hope, but don’t know, if you’ll ever win. One Southwest Florida man recently played a $20 scratch-off ticket and couldn’t believe his eyes! He won, and won big.

The sign going into town says “Welcome to Englewood,” it should probably add “home of millionaire lottery winners.” In the last 10 years not one, not two, but five people have won over a million dollars. One man won $12 million and another won $11 million.

“He had kind of a ghost, ghost white look on his face,” recalled Devon O’Sullivan who works at the Dearborn Corner Market. Last week he sold a $20 ticket.

“He sat out in the parking lot and scratched it off and started scratching a couple of zeros and thought he won a hundred, then he got more and thought maybe a thousand, then he realized he had a $3 million winning ticket there,” added Cindy Meals, the store’s co-owner.

It was O’Sullivan who sold the ticket to Mark Lewis. “I had never seen anything like that. I had never seen a win that big. I had always wanted to sell one that big but I had never seen one and part of me wondered if they even existed.”

The Dearborn Corner Market specializes in fishing tackle, bait, and apparently, selling Lottery tickets that actually win.

“The last couple of years we’ve sold a lot of winning tickets and the lottery will give us a sign saying that we’ve sold a winning ticket,” said Meals.

The lucky lottery winner was identified as Mark Lewis, a man in his 40s. Rather than take $150,000 for each of the next twenty years, he decided to take that one check for $2,400,000.

In case you’re wondering, the store owners do not get anything for selling a winning scratch-off ticket.

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