$430 million Powerball winners credit 'divine intervention'

It was divine intervention. That's what the winners of the $430 million Powerball jackpot say got them their lucky break.

The Smith family came forward on Friday as the winners of Saturday's Powerball lottery drawing. The sole winning ticket was sold at a 7-Eleven store in Trenton, New Jersey.

When asked how they chose the winning numbers, Valerie Arthur, one of the siblings who will be sharing the jackpot said it was, "divine intervention."

In all, eight family members bought the lucky ticket. They will share the jackpot.

The jackpot was the ninth-highest U.S. lottery prize in history, lottery officials said. It was also the sixth-largest jackpot in the multi-state lottery game's history and the largest single jackpot winning ticket ever sold in New Jersey.

The prize will be paid in a lump sum of $284 million. It would be worth the full $429.6 million if the winners had opted for an annuity payout over 29 years, said lottery spokeswoman Judith Drucker.

The Smith family purchased two $2 tickets for drawings held on Wednesday and Saturday, and paid $1 extra on each ticket for the "Power Play" option that multiplies the winnings. There was no winner in the drawing on Wednesday, May 4.

"We are very lucky in New Jersey," Carole Hedinger, New Jersey Lottery executive director, told a news conference earlier this week. "We've sold four out of the top 11 Powerball jackpot tickets in the last couple of years going back to March 2013."

In January, the grand prize of $1.6 billion for tickets sold in California, Florida and Tennessee set a record high for lottery prizes.

The winners chose their own numbers, the same on both days, rather than allowing them to be generated randomly, Hedinger said. The winning ticket was purchased on Tuesday, May 3 and matched the winning numbers drawn on Saturday, May 7: 25 66 44 5 26 and Powerball 9.

Powerball is played in 44 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Saturday's Powerball followed 17 consecutive draws without a winner.

The odds of winning at Powerball have been calculated at one in 292 million.