Iowa man gets engaged, wins big lottery jackpot same weekend

Nick Miller of Bernard, Iowa had a particularly good weekend recently. He proposed to his girlfriend on Thursday (she said “yes”) and the next morning he won a lottery prize worth almost $400,000.

“I’m ready for the next parts of life, I guess!” Miller said when he claimed his prize Monday at Iowa Lottery headquarters in Clive.

Miller, 31, said that his fiancée, Lauren Timmerman, said yes to his marriage proposal on June 22. The next morning, on his way to work cattle with his brother, he stopped for coffee and breakfast pizza at Casey’s, 717 First Ave. E. in Cascade.

Miller noticed while he was at the store that the jackpot in the Super 7s Progressive InstaPlay game had risen to nearly $400,000, so he decided to try his luck. “I went back to my truck and the first thing I did was look down to the progressive jackpot game and started matching my winning numbers,” Miller said. “And I had one and then two and then I saw the third one, so I had to do a double-take and check them again. Eventually, I checked them on my mobile app, and sure enough, it was the winner.”

Miller won the game’s progressive jackpot of nearly $390,191. It took almost two months for the big prize to reach that level. Before Miller won, the last winner has been on April 4 with a ticket purchased in Marion.

Super 7s Progressive InstaPlay is a $30 game. The jackpot starts at $50,000 and increases with each ticket sold statewide until it’s won. The InstaPlay game combines features from instant-scratch and lotto games. These tickets are called scratchless because they have no security coating that needs to be removed to determine the prize won.

Miller, who farms with his family and works at Rail-Way Inc., a company in Cascade that produces railroad crossings, said he was ready to tell everyone after his win. Unfortunately, he and his fiancée were leaving for a week-long family vacation in Florida, so he kept the news to himself. He kept worrying that he made a mistake reading the ticket. “Once in a while I would second-guess myself, and be like, ‘I hope that was the winning ticket,’” he said.

There are already plans for the jackpot, according to Miller. “There is the wedding and a house to start doing some work on,” he said. “It will definitely go a long way towards both of those.”

Miller’s InstaPlay jackpot was one of four major prizes won in Iowa over five days in late June. The lucky streak began with a $1 million Mega Millions prize won on June 23 in Davenport. Miller won his InstaPlay prize in Cascade on June 24 and a Powerball prize of $2 million was won the same day in Ottumwa. On June 27, someone in Centerville won a prize of $25,000 a year for life in the Lucky for Life game. The $1 million Mega Millions prize in Davenport is the only one of the four that remains unclaimed.