Alicia Arritt had no inkling that her ex-boyfriend was planning to blow up one of the swankiest hotels on the Las Vegas Strip.
In the days before the explosion and apparent suicide, Matthew Livelsberger’s texts to her were playful, almost like a child with a new toy.
“I rented a Tesla Cybertruck. It’s the s***,” he wrote her at 9 a.m. on Sunday from Denver. He continued to text her until New Year’s Eve, sending photos and music videos of the vehicle.
“I feel like Batman or halo,” he texted at 9:07 a.m. on Sunday.
It sounded like conversation between old friends, but, according to Arritt, it was strange to hear from him out of the blue. The two had stopped talking and moved on after a painful 2021 breakup.
Livelsberger married and had a baby daughter. Arritt is a single mother who works 12-hour shifts. She was glad to hear from him.
“I’m building drones in my new position,” he wrote.”You would love it.”
“How fast is it?” Arritt asked of the Cybertruck. He texted back: “Ungodly.”
Authorities in Las Vegas on Thursday said Livelsberger, a Green Beret, shot himself inside a Tesla Cybertruck on New Year’s Day seconds before the vehicle exploded in front of President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas.
Livelsberger was a Colorado Springs resident who had spent the majority of his 19-year military career at Fort Carson and on assignment in Germany, according to new information from the U.S. Army and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
‘Kindest man I ever knew’
“I just want everyone to know that Matt was the kindest man I ever knew,” Arritt told the Denver Gazette. “He got me through a difficult time.”
When Livelsberger’s mother became ill, he bought her a house. He had two back surgeries from his days as a paratrooper.
Arritt said Livelsberger was an honorable man who loved his country. She does not understand why he did it, she said.
Politically, she knew him as a conservative, but she wondered why he would pack explosives in a truck created by Elon Musk and park it in front of a hotel owned by the Republican president-elect.
One neighbor of Livelsberger in their northeast Colorado Springs townhome complex was shocked to learn the bombing suspect was him.
Cindy Helwig said she’s known Livelsberger and his current wife, who just recently had a baby, for two years.
“He seemed like a normal guy,” she said after talking to other neighbors on Thursday morning. “His wife is awesome, too. I never expected anything like that. I would never have thought it would have been him.”
Arritt cried when she realized investigators could only identify him by the World War II plane tattoo on his right arm.
A three-year relationship
The two met in 2018 after Livelsberger and his first wife, Sara, divorced. They had military service in common. Arritt was an Army nurse at one time, stationed at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and he was in Special Forces.
In one photo taken on a mountain hike, she has a wildflower in her hair and he’s standing behind her smiling. The picture was taken during a government trip for “spy school” in Washington state.
Arritt said that Livelsberger’s behavior changed in 2019 after he returned from a tour in the Middle East with a traumatic brain injury. He became isolated. She believes that the depressive symptoms he showed went untreated because “it’s not acceptable to seek treatment when someone is in Special Forces.”
The relationship did not last, partly because “he wanted to focus on his career,” Arritt, of Colorado Springs, said in a phone interview on Thursday.
On Wednesday, New Year’s Day evening, the FBI knocked on Arritt’s door. They had tracked her from the text messages they found on Livelsberger’s account. She was at work.
Agents circled back on Thursday morning and arranged to meet her at around 9.
She showed them that, on Dec. 29, Livelsberger sent photos of the gold-hued Tesla Cybertruck he rented.
“It matches my Kobe 2 shoes I had when I was little,” he wrote. “Google them.”
There was no clue in the sporadic text check-ins that Livelsberger was planning to blow up the hotel and possibly end his life.
The FBI told Arritt that she was not the only old girlfriend Livelsberger contacted in those last few days.
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Still, she feels guilty, she said.
“I don’t know if I could have stopped him,” she said.
The Colorado Spring Gazette’s Emily Moyer contributed to this story.