The driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that caught fire and exploded in Las Vegas outside one of the hotels in Donald Trump’s business empire has been identified as Matthew Livelsberger, a US army veteran from Colorado Springs, Colorado, who died in the incident.
Livelsberger, 37, was killed in the explosion, while seven bystanders were wounded. The military veteran, identified by Denver’s KOAA and KTNV media outlets, was behind the wheel of the electric-powered truck, which investigators soon after discovered was packed with fireworks-style mortars, camping fuel and gas canisters when it exploded on Wednesday morning.
Law enforcement sources confirmed to local news outlets that the electric vehicle was rented from Turo, the vehicle-sharing service that was also used in the New Orleans attack the same day. There, suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar used the Turo app to rent an electric Ford pickup truck used in that attack in the early hours of New Year’s Day, which killed 15 and injured dozens more.
News station Denver 7 cited law enforcement sources on Thursday that Livelsberger and Jabbar had served at the same military base – a possible connection the US army has not independently confirmed to the Guardian.
Authorities were investigating the link as a possible connection between the two New Year’s Day attacks, those sources told the outlet.
In a national address on Wednesday, Joe Biden said that ongoing investigations into the New Orleans attack were “fluid”. The president added that law enforcement officials were investigating whether the Bourbon Street attack was related at all to the Las Vegas Tesla vehicle explosion.
No such connection had yet been uncovered, Biden said, and he pledged to keep Americans updated “contemporaneously” as the investigation progresses.
Livelsberger served over 19 years in the army – 18 of which were spent with special forces, according to his LinkedIn profile. His most recent role was listed as a remote and autonomous systems manager, which he had been in for just three months.
Jabbar enlisted in the army in March 2007, working in both human resources and information technology, and was deployed to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010, then transferred into the US army reserve in 2015. He served until July 2020 and left the military with the rank of staff sergeant.
The Trump hotel was not damaged in the explosion. The Tesla founder, Elon Musk, later posted on X that “the evil knuckleheads picked the wrong vehicle for a terrorist attack. Cybertruck actually contained the explosion and directed the blast upwards. Not even the glass doors of the lobby were broken.”
Colorado Springs addresses connected to Livelsberger were staked out and later raided by FBI agents on Wednesday.
Kevin McMahill, sheriff of the Las Vegas metropolitan police department, confirmed at a news conference that the truck used in the attack was rented from Turo in Colorado and driven to Nevada.
A Turo spokesperson said in a statement: “We are actively partnering with law enforcement authorities as they investigate both incidents. We do not believe that either renter involved in the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat.”
Musk said on Wednesday afternoon on X that “we have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself. All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion.”
In an earlier post on the platform after attending a New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Musk said. “The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
