(Radio Iowa) – A Dubuque man who bought a lottery ticket on April Fools’ Day that ended up being a winner of a record 40 million dollar jackpot thought it was a joke. Sixty-one-year-old Earl Lape says the called him from the store where he bought the ticket and told him he had to come in.

He says they told him he’d won and he laughed and said “yeah its’s April Fools.” Lape is a retired mechanic, and finally started to believe the news when he took his winning ticket to the local store where he bought it and had it checked on the lottery terminal. Lape chose to receive his winnings in the lump-sum option of just more than 21 million dollars.

He says he plans to invest his winnings so the money could help his family for generations to come. He also is planning donations to organizations that benefit children with medical issues, specifically the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital in Iowa City, and Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines.

(Iowa Lottery photo)

He says a lot of parents don’t have money and a lot of insurance companies don’t cover some of the issues the kids have. The jackpot he won was a record for the Lotto America game after no one won since July 2021. The previous record had been around $23 million in 2018.

Lape bought his jackpot-winning ticket at Eichman’s, a restaurant and convenience store on Highway 52 in Dubuque. This is the second Lotto America jackpot won in Iowa. A Davenport man won a little more than $4 million jackpot in the game in May 2018.