A soldier killed in the Las Vegas bombing leaves a suicide note and calls it a wake-up call for the country’s ills
Las Vegas Bombing Suicide Note: An Army soldier who died in a Tesla Cybertruck explosion outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas left a suicide note saying the attention-grabbing move was intended to “sound the alarm” about the country’s ills, investigators said Friday.
Matthew Livelsberger, 37, a Green Beret from Colorado Springs, also wrote in his suicide note that he needed to “cleanse my mind” of the dead he knew and the “burden of the lives I took.”
Officials with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said Livelsberger did not appear to harbor ill will toward President-elect Donald Trump.
“While this incident has received more publicity and sensationalism than ever before, it ultimately appears to be a tragic suicide involving a highly decorated combat veteran who was struggling with PTSD and other issues,” Spencer Evans, the FBI’s top special agent, said at a news conference.
The blast left seven people with minor injuries but caused no damage to the hotel. Authorities said Friday that Levsberg acted alone.
“This was not a terrorist attack; this was a wake-up call. Americans are only interested in spectacle and violence. What better way to make my point than with a display of fireworks and explosives?” Levsberg wrote in a letter that authorities found but released only a portion of investigators identified the Tesla driver as Levsberg through tattoos and DNA comparisons with relatives because the car was burned beyond recognition. According to autopsy officials, Levsberg died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Pentagon officials declined to say whether Levsberg suffered from mental health issues but said they had turned over his medical records to police.
Authorities extracted messages from two letters Levsberg wrote using a cellphone messaging app, said Dori Koren, assistant sheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
The letters covered a range of topics, including political grievances, domestic issues, and social problems, Koren said.
Meanwhile, Tesla engineers helped investigators extract data from the electric pickup, including Levsberg’s route between charging stations from Colorado through New Mexico and Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Koren said. “We still have a lot of data to process,” Koren said. “There are tens of thousands, if not millions, of videos, photos, documents, and web browsing histories, all of which need to be analyzed.”
The new details come as investigators try to determine Levsberg’s motives, including whether he wanted to make a political point through Tesla and the hotel named after the president-elect.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has recently become a member of Trump’s inner circle. Neither Trump nor Musk was in Las Vegas on the day of the explosion, Wednesday morning. Both attended a New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s South Florida estate.
Musk spent about $250 million during the presidential campaign to support Trump, who has tapped the world’s richest man to co-lead a new effort to find ways to cut the size and spending of government.
Investigators suspect Levsberger may have been planning a more destructive attack, but the steel body of the vehicle absorbed much of the force of the improvised explosive.
Investigators previously said Levsberger shot himself inside the pickup truck before it exploded outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day, loaded with fireworks.
“We noticed that the vehicle was parked in front of the Trump Tower, and it was a Tesla, but we have no information at this point that would specifically tell us or indicate that it was because of this particular ideology,” the FBI’s Evans said Thursday.
A law enforcement official said investigators learned through interviews that he may have argued with his wife over relationship issues shortly before renting the Tesla and buying guns in Colorado last Saturday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Levsberger served in the Green Berets, a highly trained special forces unit tasked with combating terrorism and training partners overseas. The Army said he had been in the Army since 2006 and had risen through the ranks during long overseas tours, including two tours to Afghanistan and service in Ukraine, Tajikistan, Georgia, and the Congo. He had recently returned from an overseas tour of duty in Germany and was on leave at the time of his death, according to a U.S. official.
He was awarded a total of five Bronze Stars, including one with Valor for courage in combat, an Infantry Combat Badge, and an Army Commendation Medal with Valor.
The explosion of the truck, which was loaded with fireworks and campground fuel cans, came hours after Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, was shot and killed by police early on New Year’s Day after he drove a truck into a crowd celebrating New Year’s Eve in New Orleans’s famous French Quarter, killing at least 14 people.
Discover more from Meritnews24
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
