A St. Louis County couple has stepped forward to claim the prize for a multimillion-dollar lottery ticket sold in Duluth, and the store that sold them the ticket has stepped up to share its good fortune with the local food bank.
The winners of the $3.62 million Hot Lotto prize have been identified as Edward and Mary Lou Ruiz of Canyon, about 30 miles northwest of Duluth. Edward Ruiz purchased the winning ticket -- a single quick pick -- from the Miller Hill Super One Foods store last weekend.
Super One will receive $10,000 from the lottery for selling the winning ticket. The company said Friday it plans to donate the money to Second Harvest Food Bank, where it will be proportionally matched by Minnesota FoodShare during its March donation campaign.
The phone number listed for Ruiz was disconnected Friday night, but the couple told their story to lottery officials, who issued a news release Friday.
Ruiz said he discovered they had won the lottery the day after the drawing. He had scratched the numbers down on a newspaper, but he didn't ask his wife to check the ticket until the next day.
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Here's how the numbers unfolded, according to lottery officials:
"We have the Hot Ball," Mary Lou told her husband. "We have one [number]. We have two. We have them all! We won!"
Then, Ruiz told lottery officials, "I got up immediately from my chair, took the ticket, looked at the newspaper, looked at the ticket and said, 'I can't believe this!' and got on the Internet."
Super One officials, meanwhile, said that with donations down and demand up at area food shelves, a donation to the food bank seemed like the best use of the grocery store's bonus.
"After the shock wore off that a winning ticket was purchased from one of our stores ... right away it was, where can we do the most good with this?" said Valerie Kusch, advertising director of Miner's Inc., which owns Super One Foods. "With the economy the way it is and with so many people out of work, it was a no-brainer."
Kusch said the cause is important to the company because it was important to Michael Miner, who was vice president of the company and died in 2004.
The Ruizes are the state's seventh Hot Lotto jackpot winners since the game's inception in 2002. They chose the $2.37 million cash option instead of taking the ticket's full value over 30 years.
The couple's winning numbers were 3, 6, 21, 22, 27, and the Hot Ball was 2.
