- TRENTON, N.J. (Reuters) -
The New Jersey Lottery will pay out more than $1 million to thousands of
lottery winners who bet on the flight number of the jetliner that crashed
in New York this week, lottery officials said on Tuesday.
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- American Airlines Flight 587 plunged into a quiet Queens
neighborhood on Monday morning, killing all 260 people aboard the Airbus
A300 in a fiery air disaster that shook New Yorkers with fears of a deadly
new attack almost exactly two months after Sept. 11.
-
- Hours later, not only did ``587'' turn out to be the
winning number in the New Jersey Lottery's Pick-3 game, but players wound
up buying a whopping 27,829 winning tickets. They each won $16, and the
money won by other types of tickets that also contained the flight number
pushed the total payout over $1 million.
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- The macabre twist of fate did not end there, however,
because a slight variation on the plane's flight number -- 578 -- had also
been the winner in a midday lottery drawing.
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- Virginia Haines, executive director of the New Jersey
Lottery, said the matching numbers were an obvious rarity. ''Since I've
been director, for over seven years, it's the first time this has happened
with Pick-3,'' she said.
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- But Haines said numbers involved in disasters, even the
numerical date for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, are often ready fodder for lottery players in search of a winner.
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- ``It's sad to say,'' Haines remarked. ``I don't understand
all of their thinking, but numbers like this mean something to people who
play. They're not taking away from how they feel about the tragedy. It's
just numbers.''
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- Earlier this months in Colombia, nearly 1,000 people
who bet on 311 -- the number on the license plate of a vehicle used as
a car bomb by Marxist rebels -- won about $350 each in a state-sponsored
lottery. A betting house manager said at least one out of every five winners
had bet on the license plate which had been flashed across the evening
television news.
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- The Pick-3 game, which costs 50 cents to play, is one
of five New Jersey Lottery games that generate annual revenues of $1.8
billion. Proceeds fund education and institutional housing for the physically
and mentally disabled.
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