Soldier Who Blew Up Cybertruck Left Notes

A highly decorated Army soldier who fatally shot himself in a Tesla Cybertruck just before it blew up outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas left notes saying the New Year's Day explosion was a stunt to serve as a "wake up call" for the country's ills, investigators said Friday. Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, also wrote in notes he left on his cellphone that he needed to "cleanse" his mind "of the brothers I've lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took." Livelsberger served in the Army since 2006 and deployed twice to Afghanistan. More from the AP:

• "This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives," Livelsberger wrote in one letter found by authorities and released Friday.
• Livelsberger's letters covered a range of topics including political grievances, societal problems, and both domestic and international issues, including the war in Ukraine. He said in one letter that the US was "terminally ill and headed toward collapse."
• Tesla engineers, meanwhile, helped extract data from the Cybertruck for investigators, including Livelsberger's path between charging stations from Colorado through New Mexico and Arizona and on to Las Vegas, according to Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren.
• "We still have a large volume of data to go through," Koren said Friday. "There's thousands if not millions of videos and photos and documents and web history and all of those things that need to be analyzed."
• Livelsberger harbored no ill will toward President-elect Donald Trump, law enforcement officials said. In one of the notes he left, he said the country needed to "rally around" Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
• "Although this incident is more public and more sensational than usual, it ultimately appears to be a tragic case of suicide involving a heavily decorated combat veteran who was struggling with PTSD and other issues," Spencer Evans, the FBI special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said Friday.

(More Tesla Vegas explosion stories.)