$853,492 Powerball ticket expires

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 posted 10:54 AM EDT

One of two second-place lottery tickets worth a combined $1.7 million expired Monday, 180 days after a record Powerball lottery jackpot was drawn.

Sara Westerman, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Lottery, said no one claimed the ticket sold in that state by the 5 p.m. deadline.

The other ticket was sold in Colorado, where the holder had until midnight MT to claim the prize.

All day people came to talk about the ticket where it had been sold at the Hebron BP in Hebron, Ky., said Rahul Patel, 20, who works with his uncle at the station. Some thought they may have once had it, he said.

"They had a ticket and they lost it, or they opened their sunroof and everything flew off. ... We easily get 20 to 30 calls a day about that ticket," Patel said.

The other ticket was sold at a Conoco station in Littleton, Colo.

Each ticket was worth $853,492 and were bought for the same Oct. 19 drawing that garnered a jackpot of $340 million. That jackpot was claimed by a family in Oregon.

The winning numbers were 7, 21, 43, 44, 49 and the Powerball 29. Second-place prize-winners match the first five numbers but not the Powerball. Forty-seven second-place prizes were redeemed for the Oct. 19 drawing.

Unclaimed prize money is not unusual. In Colorado last year, $9,330,287 in lottery prizes went unclaimed, according to Kristen Shew, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Lottery. About $8 million went unclaimed in Kentucky.

In 2003, a $30 million Powerball jackpot sold in Indiana went unclaimed.

"Often times, people buy tickets out of habit, and those tickets accumulate in a drawer somewhere and they forget to check them, and you know — out of luck," Shew said.

Westerman says big jackpots attract people who do not usually play Powerball, so "they don't realize there are nine ways to win."

Unclaimed winnings are returned to the states that sell Powerball tickets. Kentucky will donate about $231,000 to the Kentucky Education Excellence Scholarship, a merit-based scholarship for college-bound high school students. Colorado will donate about $229,000 to outdoor, recreation and parks facilities.

Patel said the location of his station means the ticket could be anywhere. The Hebron BP is on Interstate 275, close to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

"Probably some traveler flew by and bought a ticket," he said

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