Mystery continues to shroud Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber's motives, authorities say
Decorated Army Special Forces Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger had an 8-month-old daughter at home and a new assignment involving drones that friends said excited him. He wrote glowing Yelp reviews praising the tattoo parlor in his Colorado Springs hometown and touting the benefits of float spas. And when his father last spoke with him on Christmas Day, he told CBS News, all seemed normal.
He "loved the Army and loved America," Roger Livelsberger said.
Matthew Livelsberger, 37, was on holiday leave from his station in Germany and his father had figured he would be returning to Germany. He said nothing with his son seemed amiss.
Days later, though, Matthew Livelsberger would rent a Tesla Cybertruck, purchase two firearms, take a meandering 1,000-mile drive from Denver to Las Vegas, and place himself at the center of one of two concussive New Year's Day attacks. What led him there remains, at least for now, a frustrating mystery to those who knew him, and to those investigating the attack.
"Obviously, we're always concerned in these sorts of events to ascertain what the motive is," said Spencer Evans, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Las Vegas Division. "We understand that's at the forefront of everyone's thoughts, and so looking into exactly what the motivation is remains our number one priority."
Figuring out what drove Livelsberger to explode a ragtag cache of fireworks and fuel tanks in front of the Trump Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip is not only a priority for law enforcement. It is also a question that has left his family and friends with heavy hearts and a yearning for answers.
Livelsberger's history offers few immediate clues.
A football star in high school in Bucyrus, Ohio, he enlisted with the Army after high school through a program called 18xray that allows applicants to train to be in the Special Forces without prior military experience.
He served multiple tours in Afghanistan and even started a charitable drive to bring toys to children there.
In 2010, he helped resettle a former Afghan interpreter he had served with in Afghanistan. CBS News spoke with the interpreter who said that Livelsberger was very kind to him and his family, and would often come to their house for meals, although not for many years.
Livelsberger was divorced from his first wife, remarried and had an 8-month-old child with his second wife. She continued to live in Colorado Springs and he traveled back and forth from Germany.
People who served with Livelsberger described him as a kind person who went above and beyond. One described him as an "idealist" and a real hero in his continued service to the country, including 5 tours in Afghanistan; Livelsberger, he said, had a "remarkable" military career.
"The American people still don't understand that quality of quantifying that service — someone could say they went to Afghanistan, but what did they really do?" this servicemember said. In Livelsberger's case, he said, "on a Special Forces team at the far fringes of U.S. support, operating with a lot of trust, very little direction, and make it happen, constantly in harm's way."
The U.S. Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, are a small but elite special operations force inside the U.S. military. Officially founded in 1952, their roots trace to the World War II missions carried out by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. Small teams of Green Berets, known as Operational Detachment Alphas, are trained to carry out specialized missions from counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare to combat raids and special reconnaissance missions. "De Oppresso Liber," is their Latin motto: "To Free the Oppressed."
The close-knit Green Beret community has been left reeling in the aftermath of the Cybertruck explosion. Numerous former Green Berets spoke to CBS News to express their dismay over Livelsberger's actions.
Many spoke of his accolades as a soldier and how he was a "stand-up guy." Others, shocked by the news, didn't believe him to be involved — that perhaps someone had stolen Livelsberger's identity, they conjectured. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on Thursday confirmed that Livelsberger was positively identified as the driver of the Tesla Cybertruck. His death was ruled a suicide by the Clark County Office of the Coroner. Authorities said he shot himself in the head prior to the vehicle explosion at the Trump International Hotel and that they recovered a handgun at his feet.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Livelsberger previously served in Tajikistan and received the Department of State Meritorious Honor Award there for services at the Embassy. Now, the seemingly sterling résumé left only questions.
Those answers may yet come, law enforcement officials said Thursday, with aid from those who knew Livelsberger best.
"We have to focus on what we know and what we don't know," the FBI's Evans said at a press conference Thursday. "We know we have a bombing and it's a bombing that certainly has factors that raise concerns. 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, or any of the reasoning behind it. That's the purpose of the investigation that we're conducting is to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, why and how."
