yeah this Whittaker guy is a real prize......two DUI's, been robbed, mugged, dead relatives......his wife was even on the news saying she wished she had torn up the ticket and she was DEAD serious......poor planning by idiots who never had money and spent it like they didn't want to die with any either
Oh yes they did. Whitaker is some sort of local businessman, and already had a net worth of at least a couple of million dollars. (I distinctly remember how pissed off a lot of people were when he won. Everyone was hoping that some working class stiff would have gotten it, and instead some low-rent hillbilly version of J.R. Ewing showed up on TV instead.) That's certainly not crazy rich, but it's rich enough that you'd think they would have had some clue on how to handle the windfall. Instead, it was just proof that money can't buy class or intelligence.
I remember this guy. I remember that he stood up there with his wife and acted like a fine religious man. A few months later he was in the news because someone had stolen about a half million dollars cash from his car while he was getting drunk in a strip bar.
I remember him saying that he wanted to buy a helicopter with some of the money. The guy sounds like a real redneck.
He had money before the lottery winnings. He owned a good sized construction company.