The American lotto player who won the staggering amount of 1.3 billion dollars (1.2 billion euros) at the beginning of this month with the game of Powerball turns out to be a terminally ill immigrant from Laos. He said he would share the winnings with a good friend.
Cheng “Charlie” Saephan, 46, of Portland, told an Oregon Lottery news conference Monday that he and his 37-year-old wife, Duanpen, will donate half the money to a friend, 55-year-old Laiza Chao. She had given $100 to the couple to buy some extra tickets. The winners have chosen to receive a lump sum payment, which will amount to approximately $422 million after taxes.
Cancer patient
At the press conference, Saephan said he hopes he can enjoy the money for a while. The winner, a father of two young children, was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago and last week received his final chemotherapy treatment. “How much time will I have to spend all this money? At least now I will be able to take care of my family and my health,” he said, adding that he will find “a good doctor” for himself.
Saephan told the press conference that he was born in Laos and moved to Thailand in 1987. In 1994 he emigrated to the US. He wore a sash of the Iu Mien, a Southeast Asian ethnic group with roots in southern China. Many Iu Mein were subsistence farmers and assisted the U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. After the withdrawal of US troops, thousands of Iu Mien families fled to Thailand and eventually settled in the US. Saephan has also lived in Portland for 30 years and worked as a machinist for an aerospace company.
Note under his pillow
In the weeks leading up to the draw, Saephan wrote the numbers for the game, in which participants have to correctly guess six numbers on five white balls and one red, on a piece of paper and slept with them under his pillow. He prayed that he would win and said: “I need help. I don’t want to die yet unless I do something for my family first.” He got all the numbers right: 22, 27, 44, 52, 69 and the red Powerball 9, a 1 in 292,000,000 chance.
The prize is the fourth largest Powerball jackpot in history and the eighth largest among U.S. jackpot games, according to the Oregon Lottery. The largest ever American lottery jackpot was paid out in California in 2022 and amounted to $ 2.04 billion.
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