Mo. Cashier Sells Herself $1M Powerball Ticket

If Maryjane Hart considered herself the luckiest woman in Doniphan, Mo., for having her health, three grown kids and two steady jobs before last Saturday, she’s really lucky now.

The 57-year-old divorced convenience store clerk and pharmacy technician won $1 million in last Saturday’s $590 million Powerball jackpot on a ticket she sold herself, one week after winning another $500 on a Pick 4 ticket.

”We’re just little common people here in a very poor community so this has been a very big deal to everybody here,” Hart said of her hometown, population 2,000. ”It’s the buzz of the town.”

It took a while for Hart to believe the buzz herself after she got a call from her ex-husband Saturday afternoon telling her that a winning Powerball ticket had been purchased at the Hartland Pit Stop convenience store she owned for 25 years before selling it seven years ago. She’s now working there as a weekend cashier.

”I said, ’Well I had bought some tickets that morning,’ and he said, ’Well, maybe you ought to check them,’” Hart recalled.

Hart drove to the closest store to check her tickets and walked away thinking she was a $10,000 winner.

”I slung that ticket in my purse and got out of there before anybody saw it,” she said.

She stopped at the next convenience store to check her ticket again. This time both she and the convenience store clerk saw all six zeros and confirmed Hart was a $1 million winner.

One 30 minute phone call later-it took that long to convince her oldest daughter, Nicki, in Atlanta, that she had really won and was not joking-Hart decided to drive to the state lottery office in St. Louis Sunday night to claim her prize first thing Monday morning.

”I still didn’t believe it until we got to the lottery office and the guy started shaking his head and said congratulations,” Hart said. ”Then I knew it was real.”

Hart says she plays the lottery regularly but had never won more than the $500 she won the previous Friday on her Quick Pick ticket. A devoted NASCAR fan, she usually chooses drivers’ numbers but this Saturday, in a haste to buy a ticket while she worked, she just did quick pick numbers.

Even without her NASCAR good luck numbers, Hart is now expecting a $710,000 direct deposit in her bank account, the amount she will receive after taxes.

Hart says she plans to use the money to take a Hawaiian vacation, ”just as quick as my boss will let me take a week.”

Her boss would be her supervisor at Hometown Pharmacy, where she works Monday to Friday. She only took one day – Monday, when she traveled to St. Louis to claim her prize – off from the pharmacy and says she plans to keep working.

”I’m bored if I don’t work,” she said of her two jobs. ”Anybody that knows me knows I’ll never quit working.”

In addition to going to ”a lot more” NASCAR races, Hart also plans to reward her children with her newly won riches, specifically her son, David, who has severe disabilities stemming from a car accident when he was 17.

”Last week his Jeep wouldn’t run so I had to take him to get groceries and run errands,” Hart said. ”I told him I plan on buying him a vehicle that will start every morning.”

”He started crying,” she said.

By Katie Kindelan

FBI agent kills man after questioning him about link to Boston bombing suspect

An unidentified FBI agent shot and killed a man in Orlando, Fla., early Wednesday after questioning him about his link to one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.

Dave Couvertier, a special agent and spokesman for the FBI’s Tampa field office, told Yahoo News the shooting is under investigation. He identified the man as Ibragim Todashev, a 27-year-old Chechen-born Orlando resident and apparent acquaintance of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers suspected of planning and carrying out the terror attack at last month’s Boston Marathon.

Law enforcement officials told the Associated Press that Todashev lunged at the FBI agent with a knife.

The shooting occurred just after midnight at an apartment complex in Orlando. The agent, along with two Massachusetts State Police troopers and other law enforcement personnel, were interviewing Todashev ”in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the individual,” Couvertier said. ”An FBI post-shooting incident review team has been dispatched from Washington, D.C., and expected to arrive in Orlando within 24 hours.”

The agent, Couvertier added, ”sustained non-life-threatening injuries.”

Khusen Taramov, a friend of Todashev, told local television reporters in Orlando that he and Todashev were interviewed by the FBI for about three hours on Tuesday.

”They were talking to us,” Taramov told WESH-TV. ”And they said they need him for a little more, for a couple more hours, and I left, and they told me they’re going to bring him back. They never brought him back. … He felt inside he was going to get shot. I told him, ’Everything is going to be fine, don’t worry about it.’ He said, ’I have a really bad feeling.’”

According to NBC News, Todashev was not suspected of having a role in the Boston bombings, but confessed to investigators ”he played a role” in an unsolved triple murder case in which three men were discovered in an apartment in Waltham, Mass., their throats cut and bodies covered in marijuana. Todashev was about to sign a confession related to those slayings when the confrontation occurred.

Todashev met Tsarnaev in Boston while competing in mixed martial arts, Taramov said.

”They met a few times because [Todashev] was an MMA fighter and [Tsarnaev] was a boxer,” Taramov told WKMG-TV. ”They just knew each other. That’s it.”

Taramov said Todashev had planned to travel back to Chechnya. ”He had a [plane] ticket to New York,” Taramov said. ”From there, he was going to go home. [The FBI was] pushing him to stay, saying, ‘We want to interview you one last time.’”

According to the Orlando Sun Sentinel, Todashev was arrested earlier this month on aggravated assault charges:

In that incident, Todashev told deputies he got in a fight with a man over a parking space at the Orlando Premium Outlet mall and ”was only fighting to protect his knee because he had surgery in March,” according to the arrest report.

The Sheriff’s office report says that two men were fighting and one—later identified as Todashev—was leaving the scene in a vehicle, while the other was on the ground, appeared unconscious, and surrounded by ”a considerable amount of blood.”

Deputies pursued Todashev, pulled him over and ordered him out of his car at gunpoint, according to the report. The victim, who had a split upper lip and ”several teeth knocked out of place,” did not want to press charges, according to the report.

Four days after the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a late-night shootout with police in Watertown, Mass. His 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was later arrested and charged in connection with the April 15 bombings, which left three people dead and wounded 275.

By Dylan Stableford