Vegas Tesla Cybertruck bomber’s shocking confession to his ex– ‘My life has been a personal hell’

The Special Forces soldier who died by suicide in a Tesla Cybertruck explosion on New Year's Day had told his former girlfriend about the post-traumatic stress disorder that he faced.

Green Matthew Livelsberger, 37, died by suicide after shooting himself and detonating explosives inside a rented Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on Friday. The blast injured seven people.

Livelsberger was a five-time recipient of the Bronze Star, including one with a V device for valour under fire. He had an exemplary military record that spanned the globe and a new baby born last year. But he struggled with the mental and physical toll of his service, which required him to kill and caused him to witness the deaths of fellow soldiers, according to reports.

Livelsberger mostly bore that burden in private but recently sought treatment for depression from the Army, according to a US official who spoke with news agency AP on condition of anonymity.

Livelsberger also found a confidant in the former nurse, who he began dating in 2018, the report said.

Alicia Arritt, 39, and Livelsberger met through a dating app while both were in Colorado Springs. Arritt had served at Landstul Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest US military medical facility in Europe, where many of the worst combat injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan were initially treated before being flown to the US.

There she saw and treated traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, which troops suffered from incoming fire and roadside bombs. Serious but hard to diagnose, such injuries can have lingering effects that might take years to surface.

“I saw a lot of bad injuries. But the personality changes can happen later,” Arritt said in AP report.

In texts and images he shared with Arritt, Livelsberger raised the curtain a bit on what he was facing. “Just some concussions,” he said in a text about a deployment to Helmand Province in Afghanistan. He sent her a photo of a graphic tattoo he got on his arm of two skulls pierced by bullets to mark lives he took in Afghanistan. He talked about exhaustion and pain, not being able to sleep and reliving the violence of his deployment.

“My life has been a personal hell for the last year,” he told Arritt during the early days of their dating, according to text messages she provided to the AP. “It’s refreshing to have such a nice person come along.”

The Las Vegas explosion occurred just hours after a separate attack in New Orleans, where an Army officer drove a truck into a crowd, killing 14 people, sparking initial fears of a coordinated terrorist spree. The driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, was killed in a shootout with police after the rampage.

No apparent ties to the New Orleans attack attack

Livelsberger’s death in front of the Trump Hotel using a truck produced by Elon Musk’s Tesla company has raised questions as to whether this was an act of political violence. Investigation officials, however, said that Livelsberger was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and had no apparent ties to the New Orleans attack.

Officials also said that Livelsberger apparently harbored no ill will toward President-elect Donald Trump. In fact, Arritt told AP that both she and Livelsberger were Tesla fans.

“I had a Tesla too that I rescued from a junkyard in 2019, and we used to work on it together, bond over it,” Arritt said.

The two stopped talking regularly after they broke up in 2021, and she had not heard from him in more than two years when he texted out of the blue December 28, and again December 31.

Arritt served on active duty from 2003 to 2007 and then was in the Army Reserve from until 2011. With Livelsberger she saw symptoms of TBI as early as 2018. Livelsberger seeking treatment for depression was first reported by CNN.

(With agency inputs)