Trucker buys Iowa lottery ticket before going to sleep — but his win jolted him awake

Before going to sleep, an Arkansas trucker said he decided to buy a lottery ticket at a travel center in Iowa.

“I was honestly expecting it to be not a winner,” Bryan Hensley, of Bryant, told Iowa Lottery officials.

Or, at the most, he thought he might win enough to pay off the $5 “Cash Spectacular” InstaPlay game.

But he’d soon learn his ticket was worth a lot more than $5.

“I was just trying to get back to the truck to go to sleep,” the 32-year-old man told lottery officials. “I just scanned it and I was in disbelief. I saw a comma and a bunch of zeros and I was like, ‘Is this real?’ I almost thought I was on ‘Candid Camera.’”

Hensley had won the game’s top prize of $25,000, according to a news release from the Iowa Lottery. And the win had jolted him awake, making sleep “hard to come by.”

“He called his close family and friends, then his boss, so that he could be re-routed through Cedar Rapids in order to claim his prize,” officials said in the release.

Hensley made it to Cedar Rapids and claimed his winnings Tuesday, Aug. 29, officials said. He plans to use his newfound cash to pay off debt and save.

The winning ticket was sold at Pilot Travel Center in Altoona, about 120 miles southwest of Cedar Rapids and part of the Des Moines metropolitan area.

This story was originally published August 31, 2023 at 1:59 PM with the headline "Trucker buys Iowa lottery ticket before going to sleep — but his win jolted him awake."