The highly decorated Special Forces soldier who died by suicide in a Cybertruck explosion on New Year’s Day confided to a former girlfriend who had served as an Army nurse that he faced significant pain and exhaustion that she says were key symptoms of traumatic brain injury.
Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, 37, of Colorado Springs, was a five-time recipient of the Bronze Star, including one with a V device for valor under fire. He had an exemplary military record that spanned the globe and a new baby born last year. But he struggled with the mental and physical toll of his service, which required him to kill and caused him to witness the deaths of fellow soldiers.
Livelsberger mostly bore that burden in private but recently sought treatment for depression from the Army, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public.
He also found a confidant in the former nurse, who he began dating in 2018.
Alicia Arritt, 39, and Livelsberger met through a dating app while both were in Colorado Springs. Arritt had served at Landstul Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest U.S. military medical facility in Europe, where many of the worst combat injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan were initially treated before being flown to the U.S.
There she saw and treated traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, which troops suffered from incoming fire and roadside bombs. Serious but hard to diagnose, such injuries can have lingering effects that might take years to surface.
“I saw a lot of bad injuries. But the personality changes can happen later,” Arritt said.
In texts and images he shared with Arritt, Livelsberger raised the curtain a bit on what he was facing.
“Just some concussions,” he said in a text about a deployment to Helmand Province in Afghanistan. He sent her a photo of a graphic tattoo he got on his arm of two skulls pierced by bullets to mark lives he took in Afghanistan. He talked about exhaustion and pain, not being able to sleep and reliving the violence of his deployment.
“My life has been a personal hell for the last year,” he told Arritt during the early days of their dating, according to text messages she provided to the AP. “It’s refreshing to have such a nice person come along.”
On Friday Las Vegas law enforcement officers released excerpts of messages Livelsberger left behind showing the manner in which Livelsberger killed himself was intentional, meant both as a “wakeup call” but also to “cleanse the demons” he was facing from losing fellow soldiers and taking lives.
Livelsberger’s death in front of the Trump Hotel using a truck produced by Elon Musk’s Tesla company has raised questions as to whether this was an act of political violence.
Officials said Friday that Livelsberger apparently harbored no ill will toward President-elect Donald Trump, and Arritt said both she and Livelsberger were Tesla fans.
“I had a Tesla too that I rescued from a junkyard in 2019, and we used to work on it together, bond over it,” Arritt said.
The pair stopped talking regularly after they broke up in 2021, and she had not heard from him in more than two years when he texted out of the blue Dec. 28, and again Dec. 31. The upbeat messages included a video of him driving the Cybertruck and another one of its dancing headlights; the vehicle can sync up its lighting and music.
But she also said Livelsberger felt things “very deeply and I could see him using symbolism” of both the truck and the hotel.
“He wasn’t impulsive,” Arritt said. “I don’t see him doing this impulsively, so my suspicion would be that he was probably thinking it out.”
Arritt served on active duty from 2003 to 2007 and then was in the Army Reserve from until 2011. With Livelsberger she saw symptoms of TBI as early as 2018.
“He would go through periods of withdrawal, and he struggled with depression and memory loss,” Arritt said.
“I don’t know what drove him to do this, but I think the military didn’t get him help when he needed it.”
But Livelsberger was also sweet and kind, she recalled: “He had a really deep well of inner strength and character, and he just had a lot of integrity.”
Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Friday that it has turned over all Livelsberger’s medical records to local law enforcement, and encouraged troops facing mental health challenges to seek care through one of the military’s support networks.
“If you need help, if you feel that you need to seek any type of mental health treatment, or just to talk to someone — to seek the services that are available, either on base or off,” Singh said.
When Livelsberger struggled during the time they were dating, Arritt prodded him to get help. But he would not, saying it could cost him his ability to deploy if he was found medically unfit.
“There was a lot of stigma in his unit, they were, you know, big, strong, Special Forces guys there, there was no weakness allowed and mental health is weakness is what they saw,” she said.
Livelsberger seeking treatment for depression was first reported by CNN.
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Associated Press writer Rio Yamat in Las Vegas contributed.
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