A lottery pool 11 of people who work together, or previously worked at the Northern Valley Indian Health have come forward to claim a Powerball ticket worth $4,900,000. The winners include: Emilio Montoya, Jack Cook, Janine Cullar, John Cunningham, Deborah Harrington, Karen Hughes, Brandi McFarland, Irma Peralta, Sherron Prosser and Ebelia Villegas, and they’ve all been playing together for over 4 years now – they each chip in $3 a week to buy SuperLotto Plus and Powerball tickets. Cuellar said she sees a glimmer of hope every time she walks past someone with an unscratched lottery ticket as there is always that chance that they have won. This time the ticket was bought by Montoya from Duke’s Cork N Bottle Shop, located at 2360 Esplanade in Chico, they discovered the next day that the ticket matched all the numbers of: 5, 38, 22, 58 and 32 – which were originally randomly generated, but they continued to use those numbers from that period forward. Upon hearing the news, there was a huge rush of laughter, hugs and phone calls being made to let everyone know and some co-workers thought they were being pranked. It was all real, they will be splitting the prize of $4,927,915 (prior to taxation) between them and of course the money has different value to each member, however there were talks of buying a home, vacation and bills. Villegas laughed, saying “I used to joke with (Emilio) that I had dreams that they were going to call me one day. Never in a million years did I think my dream would come true” and yet it has! The group are all friends, not just co-workers which makes the win just a little bit sweeter.