When a man seemingly committed suicide by blowing up a Cybertruck in front of a Trump Hotel on Wednesday, suspicions immediately emerged that the act was connected to a terrorist attack that occurred in New Orleans just hours prior. The political overtones of having an Elon Musk-produced vehicle and Donald Trump-owned property involved also couldn't be ignored.
While law enforcement announced a day later that they had found no "definitive link" between the two events, that still left plenty of questions surrounding what exactly happened in Las Vegas. Did the man in the truck really kill himself? Why did a member of the special forces do such a bad job of creating a bomb that would cause real damage? What would make someone who seemed to have a happy family life suddenly suicidal? Was there an emotional trigger?
We may now have an answer to all those questions. According to the New York Post, Matthew Livelsberger's wife had left him the day after Christmas over charges of infidelity. That was when he started his road trip in the rented Cybertruck to Las Vegas.
The wife of the Army soldier who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas Wednesday broke up with him six days before he killed himself inside the vehicle, according to law enforcement sources.
Matthew Livelsberger, 37, left his Colorado Springs home the day after Christmas following an argument with his wife over apparent infidelity, two sources familiar with the investigation told The Post.
His wife — who had a baby daughter with Livelsberger — reportedly told him that she knew he had been cheating, the sources said.
That puts a bit of a different spin on his family life. Before this report, all we had were smiling pictures of him and his wife, with the reasonable assumption being they were still together. But if she left him over infidelity, that would go a long way in providing a reason for him to be suicidal.
It would also explain why someone with Livelsberger's expertise on weapons and explosives would stuff some fireworks and gas canisters in the back of a steel-bodied truck and call it a day. If you assume he was trying to kill other people, that seems like a pretty big mistake. If you make the counter-assumption that he wasn't trying to kill other people, though, then it all starts to make a lot more sense. Authorities are even looking into the idea that he chose a Cybertruck specifically because it would limit any collateral damage.
Further, Livelsberger's uncle claims that despite his wife's reported anti-Trump feelings, Livelsberger himself was very supportive of the incoming president.
The soldier had been deployed to Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018 and was known for his patriotism, his uncle Dean Livelsberger, an Air Force vet himself, told The Independent.
“He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” the uncle insisted.
For many, suspicions will remain that there's something more to this story. Still, this latest reported fact pattern does make some sense.
A U.S. Army soldier with multiple combat tours currently deployed in Germany, already a probable point of mental stress, comes home on leave only to have his wife leave him. That pushes him over the edge, but he decides to commit suicide in a way that will grab a lot of attention. He creates a "bomb" that isn't really much of a bomb and chooses to detonate it in an area where no one else will be killed or seriously injured.
All of it seems to add up. Could there be more to the story? Possibly, but for now, we at least have an alternate theory that makes some sense and explains a lot of the prior discrepancies in the case.
