For anyone who has a lottery ticket still in the car or sitting in a pile of stuff at home, let this blog serve as a permanent reminder of why it’s so important that you check them!
Last month, I shared the story of an Iowa woman who claimed a $10,000 Mega Millions® prize after finding the winning ticket in her car nearly three months after she bought it. Well, a West Des Moines man just blew that timeframe away, claiming a Powerball® prize nearly a year after he bought the ticket. The common theme in their stories: His ticket also had been left in a car.
Casey Langan, 49, of West Des Moines claimed his $50,000 prize this morning at lottery headquarters in Clive, and admitted he’d been sweating about whether the deadline to claim his winnings had passed. That’s because he bought his winning ticket nearly a year ago for the Powerball drawing back on Jan. 18. He admits he put the ticket in the center console of his work car and forgot about it.
Fast forward to this month, and it’s been a bad news-good news situation for Casey. He was recently laid off from his job, and in the process of cleaning out his work car, he found the Powerball ticket in the console. He put the ticket on his desk at home, but still didn’t check it for a few days. Yesterday, he logged onto the lottery website to check the winning numbers and got a shock when he saw that he’d matched four of the first five numbers and the Powerball to win a $50,000 prize.
Casey said he didn’t trust what he was seeing, so he took the ticket to a local convenience store to have it checked. The clerk scanned the ticket and he heard the recording from the lottery terminal saying: “Woo-hoo! You’re a winner!” The clerk confirmed that he’d won a $50,000 prize, and Casey called us at the lottery right away to make an appointment to claim it!
He says this couldn’t have come at a better time. His message for anyone who has a ticket they haven’t checked yet: “Check every single one of those!”
In Iowa, lottery players have up to 365 days from the date of the drawing to claim Powerball prizes, so Casey had about a month left to redeem his $50,000-winning ticket. He said he would have felt terrible if he found it too late.
“I’ve been driving around for a year with $50,000 in the car this whole time,” he said. He pledges he won’t do that again.
Casey bought his winning ticket at Kwik Star, 506 W. Ninth St. in Waterloo, the community where he lived at the time. He and his wife recently moved to the Des Moines area, and he said they’ll use part of his winnings as a down payment on a home. He also is in the interview process for a new job, and he hopes his lottery luck will carry forward to that.
Congratulations, Casey! You truly beat the clock!
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