Two different cities. Two different modus operandi. Two different outcomes, for that matter. But could the mass murder in New Orleans and the bizarre apparent bombing in Las Vegas be connected?

Investigators apparently don't believe in coincidences:

The Colorado Springs resident suspected of detonating a Tesla Cybertruck in front of a Las Vegas hotel and the Texas man accused of driving a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans served at the same military base, sources told Denver7 Investigates.

Authorities were investigating the link as a possible connection between the two New Year's Day attacks, those sources said.

Matthew Livelsberger is accused of renting a Cybertruck in Colorado Springs, driving it to Nevada and packing it with firework mortars and gas cans before exploding it in front of the Trump International Hotel in Vegas Wednesday morning, killing himself and injuring seven others. Shamsud-Din Jabbar is suspected of plowing through a crowd of New Year’s revelers in the French Quarter hours earlier, killing at least 15 and injuring dozens more in an attack that sent shockwaves through a famous New Year's destination the morning of a scheduled College Football Playoff game.

Did they know each other while serving at the same base, reportedly Fort Bragg? Investigators will have to answer that question, as well as whether they remained in contact. Since both perps died in their own attacks, getting their communications records should be easier for law enforcement, including computers, cell phones, and social-media footprints. However, bear in mind that Fort Bragg (as well as most other such bases) routinely houses tens of thousands of troops at any one time, so it's very possible that the two men never came into contact at all, even if housed there in the same period.

Andy Ngo did a little digging into Livelsberger's background: 

Livelsberger is also a U.S. Army veteran, like the New Orleans ISIS terror suspect. Livelsberger's LinkedIn is no longer online but there are ghost remnants of his background:

• Special forces intelligence sergeant

• Defense analysis and strategic studies degree from Norwich University

First question: Are we sure this is the perp? It seems to me that a special-forces sergeant would know how explosives work and could construct a more effective IED than a Cybertruck filled with camping gas containers and fireworks mortars. Even the Oklahoma City bomber knew how to do that, while lacking specialized training and field experience.

Assuming the identification is accurate, though, Livelsberger's resumé doesn't appear to overlap much with Jabbar's background:

Jabbar joined the Army in 2007, serving on active duty in human resources and information technology and deploying to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, the service said. He transferred to the Army Reserve in 2015 and left in 2020 with the rank of staff sergeant.

Claims that Jabbar served in the military began to emerge on social media in a video showing a man by the same name discuss his military experience in a 2020 YouTube post.

Jabbar was also five years older than Livelsberger, so their overlap may be even more tenuous. It's not impossible that these two engaged while in the Army and worked together on these terror attacks, but so far there aren't any obvious connections except to the resort to terrorism.

There is another potential point of overlap, though: Both men used the Turo system to rent the vehicles they used as weapons in their terror attacks. This still could be a coincidence, however. Turo is a "peer to peer" rental service, a version of AirBnB but for vehicles rather than residences. Presumably, villains of this sort would consider Turo less regulated and intrusive than traditional car rental services and therefore preferable in case they survived their plots. Anyone planning a malevolent use of their vehicles might also find a vehicle more suited for purpose than would be available through traditional rental agencies. 

The Army base link looks more promising, but the two attacks also have significant dissimilarities. Jabbar made his purpose clear in both the style of attack and the use of an ISIS flag on his weapon of choice. Livelsberger's purpose seems much less clear, so much so that one has to wonder whether he meant to detonate the explosives at that particular time and place. The juxtaposition of the Tesla Cybertruck and the Trump resort looks like a political message, but one much different than Jabbar's. 

Speaking of which, Elon Musk has decided to be as transparent as possible about the details of the attack. His Tesla platform gets a prodigious amount of real-time information from its vehicles, data that Musk used to tamp down speculation about a battery-system failure ... and to brag about the construction of the Cybertruck:

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. https://t.co/9vj1JdcRZV

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 2, 2025

I'm not a fan of the Cybertruck's look, but after this incident, no one can doubt its design and construction. You can't blame Musk for pointing that out under these circumstances.

But assuming Livelsberger is the perp, he did choose the Cybertruck, and must have had a reason to do so, because it is an unusual choice for a rental and even more so for the purpose of a terror attack. One has to imagine that Livelsberger intended to send a message with both the vehicle and the location of the attack (assuming the detonation there was no accident), and that lends itself to a political motive that's more domestic and less involved with religion or foreign policy. Nevertheless, that still makes it an act of terrorism, even if the only fatality it produced was that of the terrorist himself.

Still, there are too many coincidences here to feel as though there are no connections at all between the two attacks within the same 24-hour period. Let's hope law enforcement can conduct a thorough and competent investigation of both and then be honest about what they find. So far, the FBI's off to a bad start on both counts in New Orleans.