On September 8, Los Angeles police made a horrifying discovery — a dismembered, decomposing body in the trunk of a 2023 Tesla. The car was registered to one David Anthony Burke, better known to indie music fans as D4vd. And the person was later identified as Celeste Rivas Hernandez.
Contrary to popular belief, the dead do tell tales. And the more we learned about the victim’s identity and her apparent relationship with D4vd, the more horrifying the story became. But who is this mysterious girl and what was her connection to D4vd?
Here is everything we know about Celeste Rivas, and the terrible circumstances that connect her with the indie star.
Celeste was from Lake Elsinore, which is about a 90-minute drive from where her body was eventually found. Apparently, she had a history of running away from home (according to one TikTok user claiming to be her cousin, she had done so at least four times prior), and she sometimes lived with extended family during those times. She’s been described as “bubbly and sweet” by those who knew her.
Her mother claims she was dating someone named David at the time of her disappearance. There is a photo showing D4vd in Lake Elsinore prior to her disappearance, only a short walk from where Celeste lived.
We have photos of D4vd with a girl who looks a lot like Celeste, They date back to the time before she went missing. In a lot of them, she’s either covering her mouth or is partially obscuring her face with either a designer bag or a hoodie. The clearest look we get is in this video of D4vd, where again, he’s with a girl who looks a lot like Celeste, and he’s answering questions on a live stream. He instructs the mods to delete the evidence of the stream once it’s over.
So if this is Celeste? It seems the people in his entourage knew he was seeing an underaged girl.
Yes, there is. On the D4vd Discord server, there are flirtatious interactions between D4vd and ‘Celeste’ that go back to 2022. If this is the same Celeste, that means that she was 11 years old at the time of the interactions. There are also interactions between fans, in which they speculate that D4vd’s girlfriend is named Celeste.
On September 19, the Discord moderator posted a message essentially confirming the validity of the messages and claiming that he didn’t know Celeste was underage.
There’s also this video from January 2024, in which D4vd tags a user with the name “0907.” September 7 is Celeste’s birthday.
And if that wasn’t enough, pictures surfaced of the two sharing matching tattoos. Celeste has a “Shhhh” tattoo on her right index finger, which is partially how the authorities were able to identify her body. D4vd also has a “Shhhh” tattoo on his right index finger.
Before you ask, Yes, the tat could be a coincidence. For example, Rihanna also has this tattoo, which is how it became popular. But TMZ scoured through photos, and they noticed something interesting; D4vd did not have this tattoo on his finger up through August 2024, which means he got it after Celeste went missing in April 2024. That still doesn’t prove there’s a connection between the two of them, but its something.
There’s a D4vd demo, which leaked in December 2023, that’s actually named “Celeste,” and the lyrics discuss his obsession with a girl named Celeste: “Oh, Celeste / The girl with my name tattooed on her chest / Smell her on my clothes like cigarettes / I hear her voice each time I take a breath / I’m obsessed.”
Other songs that include possible Celeste references are “Hello Kitty Shirt,” which include the lyrics: “Tell me where you want it, tell me if it hurts”.
There’s the “Romantic Homicide” music video which was released in September 2022. It dropped before the Celeste went missing, but it has extremely ominous imagery, including D4vd looking at the body of a bloodied, dead girl in a bed.
And then there’s the “Rehab” video, in which D4vd’s anime avatar dismembers a girl.
Aside from the mom’s interview with TMZ, there’s a DM conversation purportedly with Celeste’s brother. He believes that D4vd killed his sister. He says that his sister wanted to wait until she was 18 to get married. Lastly, he claims that he reported this all to the police, but they didn’t follow up.
A teacher also went viral for claiming that he taught Celeste before she went missing. In the video, taken by a student during one of his classes, he claims that she actually ran away to Hollywood a prior time in order to be with D4vd (whom she met online), but that the police tracked her down and returned her to the mother.
In some of these videos and photos, the girl who looks like Celeste is wearing Hello Kitty gear, including Hello Kitty crocs. And according to her ‘Missing’ poster, Hello Kitty crocs/sandals were the last thing that Celeste was wearing before she disappeared.
Hello Kitty is an ongoing visual motif for D4vd. There are numerous photos of him wearing Hello Kitty merchandise, and he’s used Hello Kitty avatars (including a bloody one) on social media.
And then there’s these random videos where he talks about a Hello Kitty girl that he met in 2021, and he alludes to torture (pouring boiling water) if he catches her looking at other boys. Nice “joke.”
Authorities located a corpse on September 17, with police announcing that the body belonged to the 15-year-old girl. But that age is determined by the day that the police found her. Celeste Rivas Hernandez actually went missing on April 4, 2024, over 17 months ago. And at the time she went missing, she was not 15 years old. She was 13 years old.
We don’t know that for sure. But it doesn’t look good, so far.
On September 17, police executed a search warrant on an address less than two blocks from where the Tesla was initially found. Although D4vd does not own this specific house, he had been living there. The police were looking for “blood evidence,” according to TMZ.
As for his career, the pieces have already begin to fall, with Interscope discontinuing his promotion.
Clearly, this fiasco is far from over. We’ll be updating this story as it develops.