Winning Mega Millions lottery ticket worth $247 million sold in San Jose

[Spartan]

Store employees and longtime patrons were buzzing with excitement Saturday at the 7-Eleven on Kooser Road in South San Jose — and that’s before their luckiest customer ever even makes themselves known.

A winning Mega Millions lottery ticket worth $247 million was sold here Friday, the California Lottery announced. It’s one of two tickets whose owners will split the nearly $500 million jackpot, with the other sold in Florida.

The lucky numbers on both — 9-22-26-41-44, and the mega number, 19 — all matched the Mega Millions draw. Whoever won the $247 million prize has roughly a year to submit a claim form to the state lottery office in Sacramento.

On Saturday morning, a copy of the winning ticket’s receipt was taped to the store’s cash register window. Behind it stood store manager Hamid Karmloo, who could hardly contain himself over the eye-popping dollar amount that came from it. “Very, very exciting!” he said.

Both the store and 7-Eleven’s parent company, as with all retailers that sell winning Mega Millions tickets, will receive an incentive prize in the ballpark of $1 million.

Owner Hamideh Naderi, owner of this store at 1413 Kooser Road near the Pioneer Shopping Center, has already promised her employees “bonuses that will make a big difference in their lives.”

“Because they’re such wonderful people who have been working with us for so many years, I want to take care of them,” she said.

Naderi also wants to make some kind of donation to Pioneer High School, which is just down the street. Students regularly walk to the 7-Eleven for snacks after classes let out.

“We’re a neighborhood store and we have so many loyal customers every day — I hope one of them won,” Naderi said.

San Jose has seen a number of past winning tickets, including one in 2018 that hit Mega Millions’ $543 million jackpot at Ernie’s Liquors in East San Jose. At the time, it was the largest single-ticket prize in Mega Millions history, and legend of the life-changing luck has sent lottery enthusiasts flocking to the store in the years since.

Late last year, a lottery player won $11 million at another 7-Eleven location in the city.

Rex Anderson, a longtime San Jose resident, moved away from the Pioneer neighborhood several years ago, but he still visits the Kooser Road store whenever he can to buy a cup of coffee from the workers he has come to call friends.

“They have a Brazilian Bold coffee blend and I love it,” Anderson said. “Sometimes they’re out of it, and Hamid will go to the other store (on Cahalan Avenue) and grab it for me. … They’re just such kind people.”

Naderi sees another opportunity in the stroke of good fortune: Raising awareness of human-rights abuses in her home country, Iran, where since last month more than 200 people have been killed during demonstrations against the Islamic Republic.

“Iranian women are being killed protesting in the street and looking for freedom,” she said. “I want to bring attention to them any way I can.”

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