Trip to 7-Eleven ends with 53-year-old man winning $5 million in Florida lottery

A trip to a convenience store near Orlando just made one Florida man very rich.

Paul Broomfield of Winter Springs was at a 7-Eleven in Longwood when he decided to splurge on a lottery scratch-off ticket, according to a March 28 news release. Longwood is just north of Orlando.

Broomfield, 53, spent $20 on the $5,000,000 LUCK Scratch-Off game, which has 1 in 3,718,900 odds of getting the top prize.

But win it, he did.

Lottery officials didn’t say how Broomfield reacted to the discovery, but a prize that large presented him with a tough choice.

Should he take his cash in 25 annual installments of $200,000 per year (minus federal taxes) or should he go for a lump sum of money?

“He chose to receive his winnings as a one-time, lump-sum payment of $3,815,000.00,” lottery officials said.

As for the nearly $1.2 million Broomfield didn’t get, that was chewed up by Internal Revenue Service laws that require “24 percent federal withholding tax from prizes greater than $5,000,” according to the lottery.

State officials didn’t offer details on how Broomfield intended to spend his cash.

The $5,000,000 LUCK Scratch-Off game started with a dozen top prizes in 2019 and now only one remains to be claimed, the state said.

This story was originally published March 29, 2022 at 11:36 AM with the headline "Trip to 7-Eleven ends with 53-year-old man winning $5 million in Florida lottery."