For Lotto winner, it’s payback time

Wayne Leyde’s rent is going up.

So says his mother after the 26-year-old National Guardsman won $1 million on a Washington Lottery scratch-off ticket – $750,000 after taxes.

Leyde, who lives with his parents in the Mount Spokane area and has served two tours of duty in Iraq, said Wednesday that if anyone should benefit from his windfall, it’s his parents.

Leyde came into his fortune Tuesday night after scratching off one of four tickets he bought at a Zip Trip in Mead. About 10:30 p.m., he scraped away the gray metallic cover on his Millionaire II ticket revealing the winning numbers and ran downstairs to tell his parents.

The former active-duty soldier says that as he tried to sleep Tuesday night, he thought of 50 people he should give money to and about 10,000 ways to spend it. He only got 45 minutes of sleep.

Leyde, who graduated from Mt. Spokane High School in 2000, is enlisted in the National Guard and expects to be deployed again to Iraq this year. Right now, he works as a personal banker for Wells Fargo. He doesn’t plan to quit.