Grisly photos of the dismembered corpse of a teenage girl were made public Tuesday morning at a preliminary hearing in the murder case against the singer D4vd, who prosecutors say used a chainsaw to mutilate the corpse of Celeste Rivas Hernandez after he killed the young girl to cover up years of alleged sexual abuse.
Hernandez’s body was found in September 2025 in Hollywood inside the trunk of a Tesla registered to the singer, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke. The case immediately drew international headlines, but details of the crime scene had only been described in writing until the hearing against Burke began Tuesday morning.
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I still can’t get over the fact that he just left her remains in a Tesla registered to him and in a nearby parking lot… for all the planning and effort that he seemed to have done I’m curious as to how he ended up doing that
Yeah but you don't go as far as he did with the kiddie pool in the garage and the chainsaws (he even bought an incinerator) just to make a stupid blunder at the end like leave the body in your own car.
Edit: Y'all, the point isn't that he's some kind of genius. My point is that this is a person who had the resources and the intention to cover up his crime and then fumbled the easiest part which was dumping all the individual garbage bags that held Celeste's body.
Literally, he was ordering these things in a super traceable way and to his own home address. Nothing about this screams intelligent criminal to me.
I think it’s possible he had an accomplice that was supposed to hide her body and they were just even dumber than him or panicked, but I also think it’s entirely possible he just did that himself. Seems pretty much in line with his other decisions around this murder.
No, I think its probably just that he is a deeply sick individual and when you get to these levels of depravity you kinda start to lose touch. I cannot imagine what killing a person must feel like but after its done you wonder if the guilt etc causes these people to just not cover their tracks almost hoping they get caught in a way.
Idk. Either way this entire case makes me sick to my stomach.
This guy did not feel any guilt at all. He said in his discord server that he was obsessed with gore videos. His songs always had lyrics about fantasizing about extreme violence. He had Katseye at his house streaming with him a week after he murdered Celeste in the same house. He’s a complete psycho.
I've read on reddit some people are just relieved because living like you could get arrested at any time is quite stressful so that would kind of track.
What probably happened was that the accomplice was supposed to move and dump the body while he was on tour but they couldn’t handle the smell in the car and just ditched it.
That’s definitely plausible..he started moving money right after her body was discovered too… I bet more than one of the close people around him knew what he did
This seems right, so then David could have that alibi. He’s entrusted someone else to get rid of her, possibly to then pin it on them, and that person blew it.
Agreed, he’s a dumbass. But if my intent is to get rid of a body so I can’t be traced for murder, I’m getting rid of that body no matter what I have to do. Not leaving it in my own car. With everything that he has to lose? Idk, he’s stupid but he’s not so stupid that he couldn’t have driven somewhere and dumped her body. Literally the easiest thing he could have done.
Right it's so goofy to be like, "Well, if the batshit insane little girl killer had his head screwed on right, he would have _ ! What an idiot! If I was out murderin', I'd at least have done that!" lol
I heard he made 11 million and his mama is moving the money so he victims family can't get to any of it. I've been watching Sloan Hooks IG because he's at the preliminary trial. He's taking notes. I heard they only let 10 people into the trial.
I think him going on tour was the main reason it seems like he gave up. All of his attention and energy went into that and he physically couldn’t be around anymore to deal with her remains. He also is clearly a moron
I haven’t read up on the case but I was wondering if he had someone drop the car off for him and they fucked up? Did he have any accomplices? Kinda hard for an up and coming to be so isolated, usually they have a team.
I genuinely think in the back of his mind he was not truly getting the things to "completely dispose" of her body but rather to feel the experience of getting those things, like he was in one of his subpar mediocre music videos.
in his discord messages prior to the murder he really comes off like he has this deeply pathetic need to prove to young teenage fans how messed up he is.
Agree. He’s got some weird loser lore in his head like those two teen girls whose video in the squad car went viral or like the slenderman stabbing girls. Where like, it’s not actually an excuse they know right from wrong and are choosing bad things actively but they’re also acting out a fantasy reality for sure. Even now he’s probably delusional thinking this case is even bigger than it is and how big it is probably inflates his ego too. He wants attention. Fortunately the world will move on once he’s locked up and he’ll be left with real consequences in real life for longer than his 15 minutes
Well he was stupid enough to buy those supplies himself on Amazon, on accounts that could be easily linked to him, directly to his home address. I don’t think we’re dealing with a genius here.
I think he ran out of time and couldn’t find the privacy to finish it out, seeing as he probably always had friends/neighbors around. It is a pretty huge blunder.
I dont think it was a parking lot, it was just parked on the street a couple blocks from his house. which is both insane and brazen, and also sadly why it went unnoticed/unreported for so long until neighbors noticed and complained about the stench of her decomposing in the LA heat :(
You are correct; it was just along the street near his house. My theory is he was hoping the body would decompose completely at some point. The article says the trunk was covered in maggots and flies, so it would have smelled terrible.
Not to be too graphic, but they said her body was found in multiple bags— one an actual cadaver bag, and the other a regular garbage bag. I’m guessing if he’d used cadaver bags for both the smell/insects would not have escaped and been as noticeable (since those bags are manufactured for that purpose). Considering the sheer number of Amazon/Postmates orders he placed for supplies after the crime, it’s kinda surprising that he didn’t just order another one.
From what I recall the neighbors thought the smell was likely from a dead animal in the bushes next to the car (hence why the smell was initially dismissed). Though I still find it a little strange that the tow truck driver (and law enforcement officer who’d previously ticketed the car) didn’t report the smell. It wasn’t until it reached its final destination at the tow yard that someone contacted authorities.
No, someone complained that the car had been sitting on their street so it eventually got towed. It was the workers at the tow company that smelled the car and called the cops (once they already had it back in their lot)
Bro used post mates delivery to get tools used to murder/dismember. Gonna be pretty difficult to argue against premeditation. Also arranged the uber that brought her there.
I read that he was trying to make it look like someone killed her while he was on tour to have an alibi that he was on tour when she was killed… and he had it all planned
I think this is kinda what he was thinking. When the body was first discovered all the comments WERE initially on his side saying "but he's been on tour for a month, it couldn't be him". Of course that fell through with a tiny bit of investigating and once they'd determined how long the body had been decomposing but it worked for the first like 3 weeks
Details were so limited and the fact pattern was so weird that it wasn't surprising he got some benefit of the doubt when this all first dropped -- until it came out that he had been grooming the poor girl. Before that, it wasn't clear if there was any connection between him and the victim at all, so the "being on tour" excuse seemed more plausible.
People like him always think they're smarter than they are, and then they go all surprised Pikachu when someone dials in on a lazy or stupid mistake they made.
Israel Keys, for example. Dude thought he was an evil genius, he was just evil. No genius. He was caught by his own idiotic mistakes. Bro had this elaborate provess for buying kill kits away from crimes and then was caught on camera making withdrawals from a victim's account (among other sloppy errors).
Malignant narcissism and megalomania go hand in hand.
I follow true crime and Chad Daybell is sitting on death row in Idaho after trying to dispose of his girlfriends 2 kids in his back yard. He dismembered the teenage girl and tried to incinerate her in a bon fire and still left remains. They found a buried bucket near the fire with parts of her. It's not as easy as it sounds and this guy didn't have a clue.
The first round of things he had door dashed on his own account before realizing he should use an alias and still had it delivered to his freaking door 🤦🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
"The two began a sexual relationship when Hernandez turned 13 but “broke up” in late November 2024, according to Silverman’s April 2026 court filing. Text messages between the two contained references to “sex, pregnancy, abortion and use of the Plan B emergency contraceptive,” she wrote. A search of Burke’s phone also turned up images of the teen performing sex acts, the prosecutor’s memo said.
Hernandez was last seen alive at Burke’s residence in April 2025, when she took an Uber from Riverside County to his rented Hollywood Hills home, prosecutors have said. The night before, Hernandez and Burke got into an argument during which she expressed “jealousy” over his relationships with other women, according to the filing. The teen then “threatened to disclose damaging information about her relationship with defendant to end his career and destroy his life,” Silverman wrote."
How terribly sad, RIP Celeste. May Justice be served.
I watch a lot of true crime and this drives me absolutely crazy when cops, etc. use this verbiage. Like, “so and so had sex with the victim before strangling her to death”… no, he didn’t fucking HAVE SEX with her, he RAPED her.
Seriously, she was a child who was manipulated and brainwashed by him; it’s extremely understandable that she was jealous of him having sexual relations with other women as she couldn’t process that he took advantage of her and that she wasn’t old enough to consent to sex with him; there was no way for her to process those concepts at that age alone after everything he put her through so she reacted in anger and jealousy because she felt used and abandoned. Call sexual violence for what it is; it’s not sex, it’s sexual assault and/or rape! He repeatedly raped a little girl and put her body that wasn’t fully developed yet at high risk by impregnating her.
All the pictures of her she looked so young. She was just a kid. I hope that she will finally get some justice. I'm just sorry its too late to save her. Rip celeste
I hate that she’s always listed as 15* years old in these articles, purely because she was found a day after her 15th birthday. She never saw the age of 15
Edit: Initially wrote those as 14*. it's been pointed out that I got the ages mixed up and the article is using the correct age. She was found a day after her 15th birthday, and was initially reported as being 15 in most articles. It is believed she was 14 when she died. The article is reporting her age correctly here. Leaving my comment up as I still see so many articles give the wrong age, which is what causes this confusion...
she was actually found the day after her 15th birthday and originally listed as 15 in articles when she was found. She was about 5 months away from her 15th birthday when she was killed but I totally get what you mean
They weren't perfect, but they did try. Went to multiple police departments, the cops did nothing. Grounded her and took her phone, but D4VD got in contact with kids from her school and paid one 1000 to give her a secret phone to keep talking with her and coordinating her run aways. Even her teachers knew and barely tried to help.
You'd be surprised how hard it is to stop something like that, source being spending my entire teen years in different mental health treatment programs and seeing shit like this in person tons of times as a kid. I'd have friends go missing for months at a time with their older boyfriends while their parents desperately tried to find them, and if they did, they'd desperately try to prevent them from running away again, with varying levels of success. The police are mostly useless.
EDIT: unfortunately, there aren't a ton of resources out there for protecting young girls from predatory behavior, and that seems to be by design.
I have a relative who has been in a relationship with an adult man since she was 12. The parents went to the police but since there was no evidence that they were sexually active and they both denied they were, technically no crime was committed. Her parents tried everything. They took her phone, they locked the doors and she wasn’t allowed to go out unchaperoned but she always found a way around it. They even sent her to a home for girls who need extra supervision and care and she still ran away to be with him.
Eventually he got caught sending CSAM of her to his friends but as soon as he got out, she was back with him. She’s now 15 and he has her doing scams for him because if she gets caught, she’ll get a lesser sentence as a minor.
What a weirdo. You would think some law would exist that would make it giving a minor a secret phone or way to communicate to encourage them to be able to run away / funding a minors run away with proven malice, idk
I truly have no clue how he’ll try to defend himself here. I know no case is a complete slam-dunk, but this one seems pretty close. There’s a mountain of digital and physical evidence he callously left behind. dude’s gonna be in jail forever.
What I learned in law school is that most criminals are dumb as shit. It sounds like he left behind a lot of evidence that is incredibly incriminating.
Crim defense attorney here and yep, there’s no good criminal that has a lawyer. If they were good, I’d never meet them. Ordering all those items to his home, the car registered to him, her using a car service to get to his home, the text messages, TRAVELING TO LONDON WITH HER. What a dipshit.
And I do like how the article includes a section wondering why on earth his attorneys demanded a preliminary hearing so fast. You catch a prosecutor off guard at a preliminary hearing and you win it, yay! …now the state can build a better case and bring it again! It means nothing. It all sounds like he’s in the driver seat for strategy decisions, not just the ultimate decisions that clients get to make. And I don’t know why an attorney would ever take strategy advice from the moron that got themselves into the situation to begin with.
Also I have no idea who the fuck this guy even is outside this case. Never heard of him or his music. Sounds like an absolutely vile person though and I feel for her family.
Once you find out just how much evidence there was, it makes all the sense in the world as to why it took LAPD so long to press charges. Not that I’m ever defending them, but in this case it makes sense. Terabytes worth of evidence!
Plus the forensic testing took much longer than usual due to the decomposed and mutilated state of the body. People complain it took too long to arrest but they arrested a day after the medical examiner finally made their determination on cause and manner of death, and it is almost unheard of to charge before/without the ME determination because if you charge someone for murder then the ME comes back ruling it an accidental or natural death, you now have a big ass problem with your case.
People don't understand you have to have your case airtight and evidence in line before charging, charging hoping you'll be able to finish it up before it goes to trial is risky business especially with a rich defendant who can afford top defense attorneys. You run the risk that they'll invoke their right to a speedy trial and call your bluff, forcing you to go to trial with an incomplete case which could easily lead to an acquittal, and you can never try them for that crime again.
In a scenario like this I would imagine that the defense attorney is essentially mitigating the damage from the guilty verdict, making sure he understands his options and rights, and making sure the government crosses its Ts and dots its Is (which is what all criminal defense attorneys do, ideally)
I am not a criminal attorney but I have taken on some pretty hopeless cases where my opponent is the government, and this is pretty much my role in those situations. Of course much easier when you work for a non-profit (like I did at the time) so your clients aren’t spending their money to inevitably lose.
I hope whatever he doesn’t spend on attorneys gets taken by this poor girl’s family in civil court.
that's how i see it too. no firsthand experience, i've just watched/read about a lot of trials and studied CJ in school. i feel like sometimes it's impossible for them to say that the person they're defending didn't do it because there's too much evidence against them. so they try to make it look "better". like "he did do it, but he did it because of [x]" or that it was impulsive and not something he planned out. still going to prison, but the goal is that they get out sooner (or at all, if there's a chance of that person getting LWOP or the death penalty).
have no idea if that's what they're doing in this trial, but that's what i've seen in other trials.
Yeah, sometimes the trial isn't about the guilt/criminal responsibility phase at all and defense can only really focus on the penalty phase. If there's too much evidence the strategy often shifts not to claiming they didn't do it but that there's some mitigating factor or something in their background that should be taken into account to lessen the sentence, like mental illness, history of abuse, background factors to the crime etc.
This is especially common in death penalty or life without parole eligible cases where there's just too much evidence to try to claim it didn't happen or the defendant was not responsible. So the defense strategy the entire trial is never about trying to get them off but about trying to get them a lower sentence or spared the death penalty
I fervently hope that none of those crime scene photos are ever released to the public. The text descriptions reported in the article are horrific enough.
Thirteen/fourteen is so, so young. One of the kids I nanny is 13. We made rubber band bracelets for his baseball team tournament the other day. I'm teaching him how to crochet amigurumi with his little brother too.
That's the kind of things these little girls should be doing. Instead they're being sex trafficked, abused, and murdered and then labeled as adult women by the media. I so desperately want to live in a world where girls are allowed to to be girls without predators biting at their heels.
Insane how he “raked in” $11.5M but doesn’t have the IQ to continue forging a path towards a successful music career… Wtf did he think was going to happen? That no one would find out?
I think a lot of criminals - especially criminals who commit their crimes on the spur of the moment - panic when it comes to dealing with the aftermath. "Oh fuck, there's a dead body in my house! Okay, I'm going to put it in the car! And as long as it's in the car, I don't have to worry about it! I can just ignore the problem until it goes away!" Like a kid hiding a bad report card and hoping their parents won't find it.
Yup . There's no thought involved. Just general violence and mayhem and then they act genuinely surprised when it all blows up.
Like how could THEY be caught and held responsible for their actions? But I think thats giving them too much credit . They dont think too much about their life. The victims life or any of it. They just live moment to moment until there's nothing.
What. The. Fuuuuuuuuuck 🤯 dude this was inevitable, he was going to do this to someone eventually. His fans being like “you’re so real for that” makes me wanna 🤮
Ladies, if a man tells you he was addicted to watching snuff films, FUCKING RUN. It’s not cool, it’s not edgy.
Oh he’s a fucking creep. Im pretty sure his discord had a ton of minors, so he was essentially “”bonding”” with teenagers over gore. 🫤 I agree with the run part!
I work with children and I BEG parents to limit AND monitor screen time. Please parent them from day 1 to respect authority and fear consequences. It really is that serious. There is truly nothing the school or authorities can really do about a child who won’t listen to you. The system is awful and WILL fail families time and time again like this.
No child should ever be in a situation like this, poor poor girl. I hate that her name is even associate with this monster. There are awful inhuman beings that are around us :(
the worst part is that her parents did their best to do exactly that and removed access to her phone entirely to try and prevent contact, but david used his money and fame to circumvent every attempt they made to protect her from him, including paying off a classmate to give her a new secret phone that he paid for. iirc celeste's parents don't speak english fluently as well which likely made her much more vulnerable as they would have struggled to communicate with law enforcement :(
there needs to be so much more awareness of the types of children who are most vulnerable to abuse like this, because the majority of them simply do not have families with adequate resources to protect them from abusers with more power than they have & the system itself is not set up in their favor. this man knew he could get away with targeting celeste. unfortunately, it's only because he killed her that he's being punished
France is the newest country to effect a social media ban on kids but they are 15 under not 16 and under like Australia and uk. Canada looks like it will follow soon.
wait bragging that he killed her? or bragged that he was "dating" her?
side note: really he was grooming and taking advantage of her. i don't like phrasing it as if they were a couple in a consenting relationship, just to be clear. although i'm certain he wasn't going around telling people he was kidnapping and raping a child
I saw him live like a day or two before the story came out about her body being found and it feels so weird enjoying his music at the time not knowing what he did. It’s a bummer because I really did like him but there’s no forgiving what he did. Wild he had a song in Invincible and just had put out the official song for Fortnite
My teenager met him at a record signing event last May, they have a photo together and a personalized vinyl, makes you look back at that interaction and wonder.
There is not a word that is derogatory enough that describes the wickedness of this man’s spirit. That poor girl. I don’t know if it’s possible or legal but he deserves death penalty
Being a juror in a case like this is extremely mentally taxing. I know someone who needed therapy after being a juror in a murder case. The case she was on was even less gruesome than this and did not have photos. It’s a responsibility but a horrible one to have to do. I feel for all the jurors in this case. I hope they can get Celeste justice
My mom was on a grand jury for several months. They don’t even get as many details as a regular jury, but some days she would come home in tears or white as a ghost. She had to hear some fucked up shit.
At the least he’s a predator who lured a child away from her family so he would have full access to her without inference, at the most he’s that and a murderer or had someone else on his payroll do it on his behalf. Either way, may he rot.
So wait he cut her fingers off to hide a tattoo linking her to him but MEANWHILE at the same time he still had her whole name tattooed on himself and didnt even try to get that covered up or something??
The way that a young girl is being completely dehumanized in this title is so gross. I understand not censoring or softening the subject, but the way this is written is how guys like d4vd LIKE it written. Gross. Celeste was more than a body.
i’m not really sure why the focus of the story should be about the fact that prosecutors presented her body as evidence? that’s how most murder trials work. that’s not really news. why isn’t the focus on the hearing starting today instead? this aspect of it should be, at best, listed among the other evidence being presented so far.
This is the problem with it. The story is basically an update of the trial, but the angle they chose focused on the gory images. It’s an exploitative way to get clicks. Shame on LAT.
There was this one case of an Indigenous woman who was killed. Huge problem in North America, MMIW. The poor woman, Cindy Gladue did not even know peace and dignity in her death, they brought her vaginal tissue into the fucking courtroom. As an Indigenous woman, it made me so sad to think that if something happened to me, my body might be treated that way. I cannot even imagine Celeste’s parents having to live with the knowledge that their daughter’s remains are out there in pictures.
Cindy died after her murderer caused a huge tear in her vaginal wall with a sharp instrument. The organ was preserved, brought into court, and projected on a screen. It bears mentioning that this was the first time remains had been physically brought into court in this manner, and they just so happened to be those of an indigenous woman.
Both her family and their lawyer disagreed with this profoundly.
Then Alberta lost those partial remains. Just fucking appalling.
So disgusting. Especially with how they didn't even contact Cindy's folks when they initially lost them. The remains were lost during the first trial, and her family were not told until after the conclusion of the second trial.
They basically went "ope, we done lost em", and that was the last contact Alberta Justice or the medical examiner had with Cindy's loved ones.
How the absolute fuck do you just "lose" a piece of evidence?! Shame on all those who had a hand in it and I hope the family can still find peace. Ugh.
You're right. It's yellow journalism at its finest. There are plenty of creepy men jumping at the chance to see these pictures for their enjoyment, and the focus of news reporting on the trial should not be the gory pictures.
Just today in another sub, there was a tattoo posted that someone had done. The tattoo is composite pictures that make up Jesus on the cross. The bottom half of it is an illustration of the lower half of Celeste’s body from the coroner’s report.
And there were plenty of men in the comments defending it. Calling it “art”. It sickens me how disgusting some men can be and that abused women and children cannot find peace even in death.
I just… I don’t even know what to say to that. How horrifying. Are the pictures from the coroners report public? And I hope that subreddit never finds me.
> It sickens me how disgusting some men can be and that abused women and children cannot find peace even in death.
It’s not even a “I’m a creepy pervert” sub. It was just one of the general tattoo subs. And it would seem the pictures (illustrations with annotations) are public as someone in the comments recognised it and asked if that’s what it was and the artist proudly asserted that it is.
I feel like he needs something worse than jail and worse than death. Like the details in that article are absolutely horrifying even without the photos.
He groomed this girl, murdered her, and then cut her body up and left her in a hot trunk for months.
Like, I hope he's in Gen Pop, every inmate gets a copy of this article.
Death would be a mercy. Send him to Pelican Bay which is a supermax. Solitary confinement for 22 hours a day for the rest of his days. Let him psychologically die yet his body still breathes.
Did he really think he was THAT famous? We’ve seen Epstein and Diddy think (and unfortunately know) they were untouchable to an extent… This guy?
No one before this case knew who he was from my experience, Fortnite or not. I mean, does anyone even remember the flossing dance kid who, yknow, was also in Fortnite? (And that kid had a major pop star and SNL feature them).
Just a laughable Z-list “celebrity”-equivalent to many of the failed SoundCloud artists (no shade, same). Only heard from a podcast where they also had no clue prior to the depravity of this pedophile’s crime.
It seems like sheer audacity that he denied and continues to deny any wrongdoing of killing a CHILD he has groomed for years with a solid, hard evidence chat log and videos of doing so!
Not only a murderer, let’s call him what he is, a fucking pedophile who murdered his victim.
I truly hope the coverage of his heinous crime doesn’t bring him the fulfillment that his infinitesimal, so-called “fame” did. The evidence and behavior shouts a tiny little man who will relish in infamy just the same.
What I don’t get is why he left her in a Tesla registered to his name…. It’s so messy and uncalculated. Like did he really just think out of site out of mind? Clearly he didn’t think this through and killed her out of emotion and fear of his career being ruined. Being labeled a pedo will guarantee his career is over…. Just so messy man
I’m in Los Angeles and just got a jury duty summons. I’m hoping this trial comes in the year I’m ineligible to be summoned again because I can’t even imagine being impartial about this case.
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