A Tesla Model Y registered to the multi-platinum singer known as D4vd had been sitting so long on a public street in the Hollywood Hills that local residents complained in late August last year.
Curiously, even with a parking citation ticket on its windscreen, its owner still did not move it – it had reportedly been parked in different spots in the area since May and now appeared to have been abandoned. And so, in early September, it was impounded and taken away to a local tow yard.
There it sat for three more days until a yard worker walking past the vehicle caught a whiff of the unmistakable smell of death.
He alerted Los Angeles police, who obtained a search warrant so they could open the trunk.
Inside was a black holdall covered with insects that contained the ‘severely decomposed’ head and torso of a teenage girl. A second bag contained other dismembered body parts. Investigators said she could have died as long ago as the previous spring.
If she had still been alive, Celeste Rivas Hernandez would have been celebrating her 15th birthday on the day she was discovered, her remains weighing just 71lb.
Celeste had last been reported missing from her home in the working-class town of Lake Elsinore, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles, in April 2024.
The mystery of her grim fate, and the arguably even more puzzling question of why, seven months later, nobody had been arrested, let alone charged over her death, was finally resolved Monday. Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced that D4vd, whose real name is David Anthony Burke, has been charged with first-degree murder with special circumstances.
‘I am a parent of three children, and a parent’s nightmare is a situation where your daughter goes out one night and never comes back, as we will show in a court of law,’ said Hochman.
He said there are additional special enhancements that will have 21-year-old Burke facing a potential death penalty, although there has been a moratorium on it being enforced in California since 2019.
Burke is also accused by prosecutors of lewd and lascivious sexual acts with an individual under 14 years of age and mutilating human remains.
Burke’s own lawyers have insisted upon his innocence, saying in a statement last week: ‘The actual evidence in this case will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivas Hernandez and he was not the cause of her death.’
As D4vd, Burke became a breakout TikTok music star off the back of creating a song to accompany a montage he posted online of him playing the wildly popular combat video game Fortnite. By the time Celeste’s body was discovered, Burke had 33 million monthly listeners on Spotify and over 3.6 million followers on TikTok, where songs such as Here With Me and Romantic Homicide went viral.
His songs relentlessly explored themes of romantic heartbreak, failed relationships and death, infused with often violent imagery.
His lyrics and music videos, routinely featuring people covered in blood, have taken on a new significance among his fans in the light of the teenage girl’s grim fate.
The 2022 song that made him famous, Romantic Homicide, contains the lyric ‘In the back of my mind, I killed you/And I didn’t even regret it/I can’t believe I said it / But it’s true.’ (The singer had said the lyrics, which of course were written before Celeste died, are meant to be figurative.)
The official video for the song features a young woman, who does not look dissimilar to Celeste, lying apparently dead in a blood-spattered white dress and vicious-looking knives flying through the air.
Observers have also focused on how Burke, a devoted fan of Japanese ‘anime’ cartoons, claimed he had developed a murderous alter ego he named ‘Itami’ (Japanese for ‘pain’).
And despite the couple reportedly sharing the same apparently conspiratorial tattoo – written in red and saying ‘Shhh’- their relationship was no secret as they had repeatedly appeared together online.
In an extraordinary move, the LAPD had reportedly grown frustrated with the District Attorney’s months of prevarication over Burke, by arresting him even though prosecutors had not yet decided whether to charge him.
If he had not been charged, many critics would have demanded to know why – and even now some would still like to know why it took so long.
After all, the idea of the body of an underage girl, one who had been intermittently missing since she was only 12, sitting so long in anyone’s locked car trunk and nobody being called to account will strike many as not only strange but abhorrent.
The fact that the car was registered to a star inevitably raised suspicions that, in the land of Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby and OJ Simpson, a celebrity with an army of high-powered lawyers behind him was getting special treatment.
Whether that has been the case with Burke remains to be seen, although, according to TMZ, an executive at Burke’s record label allegedly told a grand jury that he didn’t alert police on first hearing about the girl’s death because he did not believe it was his responsibility and did not want to disrupt the R&B singer’s nationwide tour.
LA Police Chief Jim McDonnell on Monday confirmed speculation about the delay in bringing charges being linked to the long time that elapsed before Celeste’s body was found. He said that ‘crucial evidence had degraded or disappeared’ and that it had been difficult to determine her cause or time of death.
D4vd may not yet have quite the universal name recognition of Sean Combs – the last US music star to be crushed by private scandal – but he had experienced a meteoric rise since Romantic Homicide became a huge hit on social media. It turned him into a real-world superstar with his first major label album release, Withered, last year and tours in North America and Europe.
Born in New York and brought up outside Houston, Texas, Burke has described how he was homeschooled in a devoutly Christian household. Until he was 13, he was only allowed to listen to gospel music as well as classical composers such as Mozart, Bach and Beethoven.
‘My mom was big on, like, “You going to be the smartest kid in the world. You’re going to be a genius,”‘ he said.
Predictably, given the strictures of his early life, his teenage rebellion was fairly extreme. In sixth grade, he developed a passion for rap and particularly rappers like XXXTentacion (shot dead aged 20), Lil Pump and Lil Uzi Vert, with a reputation for criminality and violence.
He also developed a passion for video games. By his own admission, a ‘later developer’ whose socializing was drastically curtailed by his parents, Burke made his friends mostly online, especially in the gaming community, where it is believed he first met Celeste.
He has said he lived ‘vicariously’ through the experiences of his online friends but also through the Japanese ‘anime’ animation he described as ‘one of my biggest influences’.
He managed to fuse his two passions – video games and music – by making tracks to accompany the videos he posted online of his gaming.
In 2022, his debut single, Romantic Homicide, which he posted online as a soundtrack to his Fortnite gameplay, was released on the streaming service SoundCloud after clips of it went viral on TikTok. (It shot to No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart).
Strangely, because his work, music, and videos are deeply infused with disturbing and violent imagery, Burke has insisted he remains a Christian. He insists his faith has helped him deal with his fame and says his parents have been supportive of his music career, even though it’s very far from gospel and Mozart.
Burke moved to Los Angeles as soon as his music career took off and his management company rented a large house in the Hollywood Hills for him, costing $20,000 a month.
His showbusiness lifestyle among the stars was a most unlikely world to find Celeste Rivas Hernandez, growing up in very different circumstances ,a 90-minute drive away in unglamorous Lake Elsinore.
Local people remember the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants as a polite and respectful girl. However, police sources said she had a troubled home life and, in early 2024, she vanished, and alerts were posted on social media and on street posters around town.
Even before she disappeared, rumors were circulating that – unlikely as it seemed – the then 13-year-old schoolgirl was involved with Burke. In January 2024, she appeared alongside him in a livestream video on a social media platform called Twitch.
The video showed the pair chatting and joking with each other until 3am one night before a laughing Burke announced, ‘Delete everything.’ Her mother later told TMZ that by then, Celeste had admitted she had a boyfriend and his name was David.
In February 2024, a person concerned with her well-being sent a message to Burke’s purported business email address bearing Burke’s stage name, D4vd, on his record company’s domain.
The sender mentioned the runaway girl’s disappearance, saying there had ‘been talk’ that the singer was involved. If so, they added, ‘Please do the right thing and take her home. Her parents are very worried.’ According to CNN, Celeste went home a few days later.
However, they continued to see each other in the early months of 2024, with Burke once being photographed getting out of a black Tesla a few blocks from her home.
In April of that year, Celeste vanished from home for the third and last time in the final 12 months of her life. She reportedly contacted her parents for what would be the last time in May. Police sources have said they believe Celeste was living quietly with Burke in Los Angeles.
The following month, she was photographed backstage during a D4vd performance at the Ford Theater in the city.
Two months after the show, in August, Burke went on the social media platform Discord to announce that he was suffering from writer’s block and ‘in a song crisis right now.’
Minutes later, one of his followers pointedly suggested a remedy. ‘Drop the one with the missing girl celeste rivas hernandez,’ the anonymous poster wrote. Burke did not respond to the message on the site.
Celeste never went home again. Ten days after her body was discovered in September 2025, LAPD detectives searched Burke’s home in the Hollywood Hills and seized electronic devices, including a computer.
A private detective hired by the house’s owner reportedly also found a ‘burn cage’ incinerator at the property, sparking fears that crucial evidence might already be lost.
Investigators were also reported to believe that various people were involved in disposing of the body. Last November, police announced they were focusing on a particular trip that Burke took to Santa Barbara in spring 2025 but they did not elaborate. They also took the opportunity to reject some misreporting in the case, saying Celeste’s body had not been decapitated or frozen.
It also emerged that month that an investigative grand jury had been convened to hear evidence regarding possible charges against Burke and that the LAPD was treating it as murder.
An executive at his record label, Mogul Vision, was reportedly questioned by the grand jury on why he did not alert police earlier about the death. It has also been alleged that Celeste’s own family refused to appear before the jurors.
The case became even more opaque when, again in November, the police obtained a court order to prevent the coroner’s office from releasing any details about Celeste, including the cause and manner of her death. The police cited potential risks to the investigation or to witnesses.
Despite claims that they had refused to give evidence to the grand jury, Celeste’s family has reportedly been considering a civil lawsuit against the LAPD to force the release of evidence related to the case. They are hardly the only ones demanding answers to a curiously elusive mystery.
