An Oregon football player has been arrested in connection with a Monday fatal hit and run in Eugene.
According the Eugene Police spokesperson Melinda McLaughlin, the incident happened around 9:10 p.m. on Monday at West 4th Avenue and Polk Street.
“This is a complex investigation and EPD is still gathering information to be submitted to the Lane County District Attorney’s Office for a final charging decision,” McLaughlin said in an email to The Register-Guard.
Police said the person killed was a 46-year-old man but have not yet released his name.
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The Oregon player faces charges of failure to perform duties of a driver to injured persons. He is set to be arraigned at 1:30 p.m. at the Lane County Jail and remains in custody as of Wednesday morning.
It was not immediately clear when he was arrested. It is The Register-Guard’s policy not to identify individuals who are arrested until they have been arraigned in court.
“We are aware of the incident and are awaiting additional information,” an Oregon athletics spokesperson told The Register-Guard in an email.
This story will be updated.
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Alec Dietz covers University of Oregon football, volleyball, women’s basketball and baseball for The Register-Guard. You may reach him at adietz@registerguard.com and you can follow him on X @AlecDietz.
One of the members of the Oregon Ducks 2025 recruiting class decomitted on Monday afternoon, with 3-star offensive lineman Chavez ‘Sandman’ Thompson opening up his recruitment once again.
Thompson, the No. 687 overall recruit in the nation and No. 51 interior offensive lineman in the 2025 cycle, had been committed to Oregon since May of last year.
With the departure of Thompson, the Ducks now have five verbal commitments in the class of 2025, headlined by 5-star wide receiver Dallas Wilson and 4-star QB Akili Smith Jr.
Thompson’s decommitment comes a few weeks after 4-star wide receiver Adrian Wilson flipped his commitment to Arizona State.
One of the winners of a $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot last month is an immigrant from Laos who has had cancer for eight years and had his latest chemotherapy treatment last week.
Cheng “Charlie” Saephan, 46, of Portland, told a news conference held by the Oregon Lottery on Monday that he and his 37-year-old wife, Duanpen, would split the prize evenly with a friend. Laiza Chao, 55, of the Portland suburb of Milwaukie, had chipped in $100 to buy a batch of tickets with them. They are taking a lump sum payment, $422 million after taxes.
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“I will be able to provide for my family and my health,” he said, adding that he’d “find a good doctor for myself.”
Saephan, who has two young children, said that as a cancer patient, he wondered, “How am I going to have time to spend all of this money? How long will I live?”
After they bought the shared tickets, Chao sent a photo of the tickets to Saephan and said, “We’re billionaires.” It was a joke before the actual drawing, he said, but the next day it came true.
Saephan said he was born in Laos and moved to Thailand in 1987, before immigrating to the U.S. in 1994. He wore a sash at the news conference identifying himself as Iu Mien, a southeast Asian ethnic group with roots in southern China. Many Iu Mein were subsistence farmers and assisted American forces during the Vietnam war; after the conflict, thousands of Iu Mien families fled to Thailand to avoid retribution and eventually settled in the U.S., especially along the West Coast.
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Saephan graduated from high school in 1996 and has lived in Portland for 30 years. He worked as a machinist for an aerospace company.
In the weeks leading up to the drawing, he wrote out numbers for the game on a piece of paper and slept with it under his pillow, he said. He prayed that he would win, saying, “I need some help — I don’t want to die yet unless I have done something for my family first.”
The winning Powerball ticket was sold in early April at a Plaid Pantry convenience store in Portland, ending a winless streak that had stretched more than three months. The Oregon Lottery said it had to go through a security and vetting process before announcing the identity of the person who came forward to claim the prize.
Under Oregon law, with few exceptions, lottery players cannot remain anonymous. Winners have a year to claim the top prize.
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The jackpot had a cash value of $621 million before taxes if the winner chose to take a lump sum rather than an annuity paid over 30 years, with an immediate payout followed by 29 annual installments. The prize is subject to federal taxes and state taxes in Oregon.
The $1.3 billion prize is the fourth largest Powerball jackpot in history, and the eighth largest among U.S. jackpot games, according to the Oregon Lottery.
The biggest U.S. lottery jackpot won was $2.04 billion in California in 2022.
Oregon authorities on Monday are set to publicly reveal the winner of the $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot.
The winning Powerball ticket was sold in early April at a Plaid Pantry convenience store in Portland, ending a winless streak that had stretched more than three months. The Oregon Lottery said it had to go through a security and vetting process before announcing the identity of the person who came forward to claim the prize.
Under Oregon law, with few exceptions, lottery players cannot remain anonymous. Winners have a year to claim the top prize.
The jackpot has a cash value of $621 million if the winner chooses to take a lump sum rather than an annuity paid over 30 years, with an immediate payout followed by 29 annual installments. The prize is subject to federal taxes and state taxes in Oregon.
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The $1.3 billion prize is the fourth largest Powerball jackpot in history, and the eighth largest among U.S. jackpot games, according to the Oregon Lottery.
The biggest U.S. lottery jackpot won was $2.04 billion in California in 2022.