Authorities say the Las Vegas cybertruck bomber’s motives are shrouded in mystery

Award-winning Army special forces sergeant Matthew Livelsberger had an 8-month-old daughter at home and a new drone assignment that friends said excited him. He wrote glowing reviews on Yelp, praising a tattoo parlor in his hometown of Colorado Springs and touting the benefits of a float spa. And when his father last spoke to him on Christmas Day, he told CBS News, everything seemed normal.

He “loved the Army and loved America,” Roger Livelsberger said.

Matthew Livelsberger, 37, was on leave from his station in Germany and his father assumed he would return to Germany. He didn’t say anything to his son, he didn’t seem well.

A few days later, however, Matthew Livelsberger did rent Tesla Cybertruck, purchase two firearms, drive 1,000 miles of winding road from Denver to Las Vegas and get into the center of one of two tremors on New Year’s Day. What brought him there, at least for now, remains a mystery to those who knew him and to those investigating the attack.

“Obviously, we’re always concerned with these kinds of events to find out a motive,” said Spencer Evans, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas division. “We understand that this is first and foremost in everyone’s mind, so finding the right motivation remains our number one priority.”

Find out what motivated Livelsberger blow up the cache of fireworks and fuel tanks in front of the Trump Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip are a priority for more than just law enforcement. It’s also a question that left his family and friends with heavy hearts and a desire for answers.

Livelsberger’s story offers several immediate clues.

A high school football star in Bucyrus, Ohio, he joined the Army after graduating from a program called 18xray, which allows applicants to train for Special Forces service without prior military experience.

He served in Afghanistan many times and even launched a charity event to bring toys to children there.

In 2010, he helped resettle a former Afghan interpreter with whom he served in Afghanistan. CBS News spoke with a translator who said Livelsberger was very kind to him and his family and often came to their home for dinner, though 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 while 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 true hero for his continuous service to the country, including 5 tours in Afghanistan; Livelsberger, he said, had a “wonderful” military career.

“Americans still don’t understand the quality of quantification of this service — someone might say they went to Afghanistan, but what did they actually do?” said this serviceman. In Livelsberger’s case, he said, “a special forces team on the far side of the U.S. support that works with a lot of confidence has very little guidance and makes it possible while constantly being harmed.”

The US Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, are a small but elite special operations unit within the US Army. Officially established in 1952, their roots date back to World War II missions carried out by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA. Small groups of Green Berets, known as “Alpha” operatives, are trained to perform specialized missions from counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare to combat raids and special reconnaissance missions. “De Oppresso Liber” is their Latin motto: “To set the oppressed free.”

The tight-knit community of Green Berets is reeling from the aftermath of the Cybertruck explosion. Many former Green Berets spoke to CBS News to express their concern about Livelsberger’s actions.

Many spoke of his honors as a soldier and that he was a “tough guy.” Others, shocked by the news, didn’t believe he was involved — they speculated that someone might have stolen Livelsberger’s identity. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police confirmed this on Thursday Livelsberger was positively identified as the driver Tesla Cybertruck. The Clark County Coroner’s Office ruled his death a suicide. Authorities said he shot himself in the head before the car bomb exploded at the Trump International Hotel and that they found a gun at his feet.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Livelsberger previously served in Tajikistan and received a State Department Distinguished Service Award there. Now, a seemingly excellent summary left only questions.

Those answers may still be forthcoming, law enforcement officials said Thursday with the help of 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 news conference Thursday. “We know we’ve had an explosion, and it’s an explosion that certainly has factors of concern. It’s not lost on us that it happened in front of Trump’s building, that it’s a Tesla car, but at this point we have no information that definitively tells us or suggests that it happened because of that particular ideology or any reasoning behind it . The purpose of the investigation we are conducting is to understand exactly what happened, why and how.”

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