An Army soldier who died in an explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas left a note saying it was stunt to serve as “wakeup call” for the country’s ills, investigators said Friday.
Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, also wrote in the note that he needed to “cleanse my mind” of the lives lost of people he knew and “the burden of the lives I took.”
Livelsberger apparently harbored no ill will toward President-elect Donald Trump, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officials said.
“Although this incident is more public and more sensational than usual, it ultimately appears to be a tragic case of suicide involving a heavily decorated combat veteran who was struggling with PTSD and other issues,” FBI Special Agent In Charge Spencer Evans said at a news conference.
The explosion caused minor injuries to seven people but virtually no damage to the hotel. Authorities said Friday that Livelsberger acted alone.
“This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives,” Livelsberger wrote in a letter found by authorities who released only excerpts of it.
Investigators identified the Tesla driver — who was burned beyond recognition — as Livelsberger by a tattoo and by comparing DNA from relatives. The cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, according to coroners officials.
Pentagon officials have declined to say whether Livelsberger may have been suffering from mental health issues but say they have turned over his medical records to police.
Authorities excerpted the messages from two letters Livelsberger wrote using a cellphone note application, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren said.
The letters covered a range of topics including political grievances, domestic issues and societal issues, Koren said.
Tesla engineers, meanwhile, helped extract data from the Cybertruck for investigators, including Livelsberger’s path between charging stations from Colorado through New Mexico and Arizona and on to Las Vegas, Koren said.
“We still have a large volume of data to go through,” Koren said. “There’s thousands if not millions of videos and photos and documents and web history and all of those things that need to be analyzed.”
The new details came as investigators sought to determine Livelsberger’s motive, including whether he sought to make a political point with the Tesla and the hotel bearing the president-elect’s name.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has recently become a member of Trump’s inner circle. Neither Trump nor Musk was in Las Vegas early Wednesday, the day of the explosion. Both had attended Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at his South Florida estate.
Musk spent an estimated $250 million during the presidential campaign to support Trump, who has named Musk, the world’s richest man, to co-lead a new effort to find ways to cut the government’s size and spending.
Investigators suspect Livelsberger may have been planning a more damaging attack but the steel-sided vehicle absorbed much of the force from the crudely built explosive.
Investigators said previously that Livelsberger shot himself inside the Tesla Cybertruck packed with fireworks just before it exploded outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day.
“It’s not lost on us that it’s in front of the Trump building, that it’s a Tesla vehicle, but we don’t have information at this point that definitively tells us or suggests it was because of this particular ideology,” Spencer Evans, the Las Vegas FBI’s special agent in charge, said Thursday.
Asked Friday about whether Livelsberger had been struggling with any mental health issues that may have prompted his suicide, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that “the department has turned over all medical records to local law enforcement.”
A law enforcement official said investigators learned through interviews that he may have gotten into a fight with his wife about relationship issues shortly before he rented the Tesla in Colorado on Saturday and bought the guns. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
Among the charred items found inside the truck were a handgun at Livelsberger’s feet, another firearm, fireworks, a passport, a military ID, credit cards, an iPhone and a smartwatch, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Kevin McMahill said. Authorities said both guns were purchased legally.
Livelsberger served in the Green Berets, highly trained special forces who work to counter terrorism abroad and train partners. He had served in the Army since 2006, rising through the ranks with a long career of overseas assignments, deploying twice to Afghanistan and serving in Ukraine, Tajikistan, Georgia and Congo, the Army said. He had recently returned from an overseas assignment in Germany and was on approved leave when he died, according to a US official.
He was awarded a total of five Bronze Stars, including one with a valor device for courage under fire, a combat infantry badge and an Army Commendation Medal with valor.
Authorities searched a townhouse in Livelsberger’s hometown of Colorado Springs Thursday as part of the investigation. Neighbors said the man who lived there had a wife and a baby.
Cindy Helwig, who lives diagonally across a narrow street separating the homes, said she last saw the man she knew as Matthew about two weeks ago when he asked her if he could borrow a tool he needed to fix an SUV he was working on.
“He was a normal guy,” said Helwig, who said she last saw the wife and baby earlier this week.
The explosion of the truck, packed with firework mortars and camp fuel canisters, came hours after 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar rammed a truck into a crowd in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter early on New Year’s Day, killing at least 14 people before being shot to death by police. The FBI says they believe Jabbar acted alone and that it is being investigated as a terrorist attack.

MADRID: A record 46,843 migrants reached Spain’s Canary Islands illegally in 2024 via the increasingly deadly Atlantic route, the second consecutive year of unprecedented arrival numbers, official data showed.

The landmark came as the European country received 63,970 irregular migrants last year, the vast majority in the Atlantic archipelago, up from 56,852 in 2023, the Interior Ministry said.
Spain has moved to the forefront of the EU’s migration crisis as tighter controls in the Mediterranean push more migrants to attempt the perilous trip from West Africa to the Canaries.

EU border agency Frontex has said irregular crossings into the bloc from January to November 2024 fell 40 percent overall.
However, they grew 19 percent on the Atlantic route, with Mali, Senegal, and Morocco being the most common nationalities.
The latest figures confirmed data published in December that showed the record for annual migrant arrivals by boat in the Canaries had been broken for the second year running by November.
Last year’s arrivals surpassed the 39,910 migrants who reached the islands off northwestern Africa by sea in 2023, a level that had smashed the previous record from 2006.
The national figure for 2024 fell short of the record of 64,298 arrivals set in 2018 but exceeded the 56,852 migrants who reached Spain illegally in 2023.
A report last week by NGO Caminando Fronteras said at least 10,457 migrants died or disappeared while trying to reach Spain by sea from Jan. 1 to Dec. 5, 2024.
Caminando Fronteras said it was a 50-percent increase on 2023.
The highest toll since its tallies began in 2007, attributing it to the use of ramshackle boats, dangerous waters and a lack of resources for rescues.
“The loss of a single life is a cause for sadness, and we regret every one of them,” the Migration Ministry said in reaction to the report.
“This government maintains a transversal policy that prioritizes human rights and works in collaboration with other ministries and countries of origin and transit to promote regular and safe migration.”
Local authorities in the Canaries say they are overwhelmed by the waves of arrivals.
Spain’s political parties, however, have failed to agree on a plan to distribute thousands of unaccompanied minors nationwide to ease the burden.
Government minister Angel Victor Torres criticized the conservative opposition Popular Party, or PP, for the impasse.
The children would go to school, “learning our language and integrating into our society” if the PP adopted an attitude of “true solidarity,” Torres told Cadena SER radio.
Despite the crisis, Spain, a major gateway to Europe along with Italy and Greece, has emerged as an outlier in European migration policy.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez defends the necessity of migration to support the welfare state and workforce needs as Europe’s population ages.
His successive leftist governments since 2018 have eased regularization rules for illegal migrants in Spain, even as far-right parties with anti-immigration platforms have surged in Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and beyond.
Sanchez last year embarked on a tour of Senegal, Mauritania, and The Gambia, the main departure points for Spain-bound boats, to promote local efforts to curb illegal migration.
PP spokesman Borja Semper slammed the government for presiding over rising immigration numbers while levels fell in other frontline countries such as Italy.
The government uses immigration “frivolously because there is no policy, and when it puts forward something, it’s behind a banner,” he said.