The New Jersey Lottery will pay out more than US$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.
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 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 US$16, and the money won by other types of tickets that also contained the flight number pushed the total payout to over US$1 million.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Earlier this month 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 US$350 each in a state-sponsored lottery.
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