The wife of the Cybertruck bomber Matthew Livelsberger left him just days before he detonated the vehicle outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, according to a report.
The active-duty Green Beret had argued with his wife after she told him she suspected he had been cheating, the New York Post reports, citing law enforcement sources.
Livelsberger left his home in Colorado Springs the day after Christmas following the argument with his wife, less than a week before he blew up the Tesla Cybertruck on New Year’s Day, two sources familiar with the investigation told the newspaper.
His wife had a baby daughter with the army veteran.
It has also emerged that Livelsberger had reportedly been back in touch with ex-girlfriends in the days before he carried out the explosion.
He boasted to one of them, Alicia Arritt, that he “felt like Batman” after renting the Tesla Cybertruck.
Arritt, his ex-girlfriend of three years from Colorado Springs, said the 37-year-old got in touch with her on December 29 out of the blue.
“I rented a Tesla Cybertruck. It’s the s***,” he texted Arritt that morning, the Denver Gazette reports. “I feel like Batman or halo,” he added.
Arritt met Livelsberger in 2018 when she was working as an Army nurse stationed at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany while he was in Special Forces, the outlet reports.
Arritt, a single mother, told the newspaper she was surprised to hear from Livelsberger after the pair split in 2021 because “he wanted to focus on his career.”
“I’m building drones in my new position,” he told her in the excitable messages. “You would love it.”
“How fast is it?” Arritt asked Livelsberger. “Ungodly,” he replied.
Arritt revealed the FBI knocked on her door after discovering the messages on Livelsberger’s phone, and agents told her she was not the only ex-girlfriend the army veteran had contacted in his final days.
“I don’t know if I could have stopped him,” she said.
According to Arritt, Livelsberger’s behavior changed after he returned from a tour in the Middle East suffering from a traumatic brain injury in 2019.
She told the Gazette that he became isolated after the tour and believed that he needed to seek help for his mental health, but didn’t. “It’s not acceptable to seek treatment when someone is in Special Forces,” Arritt said.
Livelsberger’s uncle, Dean Livelsberger, told The Independent his nephew was “like a Rambo-type, for lack of a better word.”
Dean, whose older brother is Livelsberger’s father, Roger, himself an Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam, said his nephew “loved the Army.”
“He used to have all patriotic stuff on Facebook, he was 100 percent loving the country,” he continued. “He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American. It’s one of the reasons he was in Special Forces for so many years. It wasn’t just one tour of duty.”
At a press conference on Thursday, the FBI said that there was “no definitive link” between the Las Vegas incident and the terror attack in New Orleans that happened hours earlier on New Year’s Day.