C aden Alvarez borrowed an orange shirt from his mom, wound himself in a leafy garland, and boarded the subway from his Bronx home to New York’s Union Square. It was late April 2025, and he’d scored free tickets to a pop-up event celebrating the release of Withered, the debut album from D4vd. Alvarez was a fan of the brooding, vulnerable bedroom pop that had turned the then-20-year-old, born David Anthony Burke, into a Gen Z sensation. The costume nodded to the cover of D4vd’s first EP, Petals to Thorns, and helped Alvarez win a $1,000 fan prize.
Alvarez watched as the singer was ushered to the stage to meet the event’s host. “What’s up guys?” D4vd said in a silly chipmunk voice. He spoke about Withered and performed an acoustic version of the album closer, “Afterlife.” But as he neared the end of the song, Burke’s voice faltered. He shook his head as though fighting tears. Abandoning the final lines, he let the guitar trail off into silence.
Burke choked up again as he thanked the audience and his parents. “I never cry,” he insisted.
Alvarez, who was in the second row, thought Burke was simply overwhelmed by the moment as he celebrated the release of his debut album. But a darker possibility has emerged. Two days earlier, prosecutors claim, Burke stabbed 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez to death inside his Hollywood Hills mansion to cover up his sexual abuse of the girl. Prosecutors allege the abuse went on for more than a year, and that Burke had gotten Rivas Hernandez pregnant at 13 and talked her through an abortion. Later, they say, he killed her and then dismembered her body with a chain saw. Burke was not merely a rising star grappling with new fame, prosecutors contend, but a killer carrying a gruesome secret.
Four months later, on Sept. 8 — one day after what would’ve been Rivas Hernandez’s 15th birthday — Los Angeles police discovered her decomposed remains in the trunk of Burke’s impounded Tesla. One detective would later testify that she was unrecognizable. In April, after a lengthy investigation, Burke was arrested and charged with murder.
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In just a few years, Burke had transformed from a boyish, homeschooled gamer into a streaming-era idol. He was a budding showman — effusive and ebullient, with a strong ear for melody and a beguiling charisma that counterbalanced a discography steeped in the gloomy, tortured corners of teenage angst. His breakthrough song was called “Romantic Homicide.”
And while legal experts caution against reading criminal intent into violent art, the morbid tenor of Burke’s work is hard to ignore. He not only sang about violence in the abstract, but also used death and gore liberally in his music and visuals. He even created a blood-splattered alter ego named Itami, the Japanese word for “pain.”
The alleged murder of Rivas Hernandez has upended perceptions among fans, old friends, and people who worked with Burke. Many who spoke with Rolling Stone for this article — including, for the first time, a source from his former label, Darkroom/Interscope, and another young woman with whom Burke fostered an intense online relationship — are still wrestling with how the person they knew could be accused of such horrific crimes.
The source at Darkroom/Interscope, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says the label was blindsided. Burke appeared “locked in” professionally around the time of Rivas Hernandez’s alleged murder. “He was releasing an album; he was at a major inflection point in his career,” they say. “It’s almost the opposite of warning signs. He was definitely somebody that, in front of us, was hyper-focused and wanted to work.”
Alvarez now views Burke’s demeanor at the Withered pop-up in a different light. He remembers approaching Burke for an autograph and asking him about the lyrics to “Afterlife” that had overwhelmed him. Burke, he says, looked stunned.
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“It was just, like, complete silence,” Alvarez says. Burke appeared seized by “some sort of fear,” as if the question had reminded him of “a ticking time bomb.”
Adds Alvarez, “Was it the sort of guilt that was, like, eating him alive?”
Burke with fan Caden Alvarez at a pop-up event in April 2025. Alvarez describes him as a “ticking time bomb.” Courtesy of Caden Alvarez A Missing Girl
Burke and Rivas Hernandez met online, either through a Discord server or on Instagram, as Burke himself told sheriff’s deputies when they visited his West Hollywood home in February 2024, after her parents first reported her missing. Prosecutors recovered chats dating back to 2022. Rivas Hernandez was 11 then, a girl with big brown eyes who loved to sing and dance and lived with her parents and two older siblings in a modest stucco house in Lake Elsinore, a working-class exurb about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Burke was five years older and also lived with his parents, in a middle-class Houston suburb. A terminally online teenager, he was earning money from Fortnite gameplay montages he posted on YouTube and making his first forays into music.
Once Burke moved to Los Angeles around the end of 2023, he and Rivas Hernandez met up in person, and the relationship turned physical, prosecutors say. They allege he first sexually abused Rivas Hernandez in November 2023, when she was 13 and he was 18. By then, he was a rising star with a major-label deal who’d opened for SZA on her SOS tour. A trove of messages from that time, some of which were read in court during a preliminary hearing in the case, show Burke alternating between affection, playfulness, control, and cruelty in their interactions.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, Burke allegedly texted Rivas Hernandez that he would pick her up in Lake Elsinore that night. The two planned to move in together, and Burke told her it would be the “most important day of ur life next to the wedding day,” according to texts read in court. They called the plan “Operation Awesome.”
The next day, Rivas Hernandez’s parents phoned the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department to report that their daughter had run away, call logs reviewed by Rolling Stone confirm. Her mother, Mercedes Martínez, posted a flyer on Facebook. “Missing!!!” it read in bold red letters. “I’m distressed,” she wrote in Spanish in the caption. “I’ve already filed a report with the police. If you know anything, call me.”
“Everything happened so fast, I feel like he lost himself. his spirit and whole appearance changed. He became a new person.”
Officials from both Riverside and L.A. County contacted Burke after finding his number in Rivas Hernandez’s phone records. In bodycam footage of the L.A. deputies’ visit to his home, revealed in court, they told Burke that Rivas Hernandez was a 13-year-old runaway. He claimed he had no idea she was a minor, insisting they’d only met once in person, the previous November.
On a recent Twitch stream, Aysia Collins, one of Burke’s closest friends and a stylist on his Withered tour, recalled seeing the missing-person flyer. She said she texted the person who posted it and told them the photo was of her friend’s girlfriend. When the person replied that the girl was 13, Collins said, she wrote back, “What the fuck.” She claimed she immediately confronted Burke, who told her Rivas Hernandez was 19, while producing some kind of “proof.” (Collins declined on the stream to say what he showed her and declined to comment for this article.)
When Rivas Hernandez returned home later that month, her parents confiscated her phone. Burke then allegedly visited Lake Elsinore and paid one of her classmates $1,000 to slip her a secret phone. In April, Rivas Hernandez’s parents reported her missing again. Over the course of the year, she and Burke allegedly spent significant time together, even traveling to Las Vegas, London, and Texas. (Burke’s lawyers established through pretrial testimony that Rivas Hernandez’s parents knew about some of the travel and had signed a notarized consent form allowing her to fly to London with him.)
Prosecutors say the extent of the relationship became clear only after Rivas Hernandez’s death, when investigators recovered an old iPhone at Burke’s residence and gained access to his digital accounts. They found dozens of photographs showing Burke sexually abusing Rivas Hernandez, often at his home. One photo shown in court depicted Rivas Hernandez wearing what looked like a diamond engagement ring on her left ring finger, which had been tattooed in red cursive with the name “David.” Prosecutors say Burke later amputated that finger when he allegedly dismembered Rivas Hernandez’s body.
Burke and Rivas Hernandez “broke up” in November 2024, but the sexual abuse continued, prosecutors say. By March 2025, she appeared increasingly frustrated. “All we do is have sex and just hang out man I want more than that for myself,” she texted Burke. On April 22, prosecutors say, Burke and Rivas Hernandez got into a lengthy argument over text, in which she expressed jealousy over his relationship with Collins. During the exchange, Rivas Hernandez threatened to reveal their illicit relationship and destroy his career. She said she wanted to see him, and he agreed to send a car.
What prosecutors say happened next reads like a horror script: At around 10:10 p.m. on April 23, Rivas Hernandez arrived at Burke’s house, where he allegedly stabbed her to death and watched her bleed out. Prosecutors claim Burke then texted and called Rivas Hernandez’s phone multiple times as he drove to a remote area of Santa Barbara County, purportedly to dispose of evidence. They say the messages were part of a “premeditated plan to cover up the murder.”
A portrait of Rivas Hernandez on display as authorities announced murder charges in the case in April. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images The next day, Burke did a radio interview and attended his album-release party before flying to New York and Texas for Withered events. In early May, he allegedly ordered two chain saws from Amazon and a third from Home Depot, and later dismembered Rivas Hernandez’s body in a blue inflatable pool inside his three-car garage. After that, prosecutors allege, he placed her remains in a black cadaver bag and a garbage bag and stacked them in the Tesla, which he loaded up with at least 11 air fresheners. Burke then parked the car around the corner from his house and left in late July for the North American leg of his Withered tour, which was scheduled to stretch into September.
At his San Francisco tour opener and other stops, Burke went all in on a funeral theme. He had a black hearse deliver a white coffin, ostensibly marking the symbolic death of a musical era. That first night, he wore a pink Hello Kitty sweatshirt onstage, an eerie echo of the Hello Kitty sandals Rivas Hernandez was said to have been wearing when she allegedly ran away to be with him.
He’d been gone 38 days and played 24 shows before the Tesla was tagged and towed on Sept. 5. Three days later, the tow-yard manager called police, saying the Tesla was “emanating a foul odor and attracting flies.” After news broke of the grisly discovery, Alvarez, like many fans, refused to believe Burke was involved. Now, he says, he feels sickened: “It’s fascinating how a person can deceive you.”
Burke’s friends and acquaintances who spoke with Rolling Stone were similarly disturbed. Some theorized that he was unable to navigate the whiplash of going, almost overnight, from a deeply religious childhood home in Texas to the unsupervised playground of Los Angeles, with all the excesses afforded by his newfound fame and wealth.
“Everything happened so fast, I feel like he lost himself,” says Santiago Pascoe, who knew Burke back in Texas. “He was real big on Christianity, and then that dissolved. His spirit and his whole appearance changed. He became a new person.”
In an interview one month after the alleged murder, Burke insisted the transition was “super smooth.” When he left home and started going on tour, he said, “I just treated everybody like they were behind the screen. I was able to kind of put the shyness and the anxiety aside and be like, ‘OK, real life is just Fortnite, even. Treat everybody like a video game. This is Fortnite right now.’”
Life’s a Game
Burke was born in New York City and raised in Houston. But when a reporter once asked where he was from, he said, “The internet.”
Colleen, his mother, was a teacher, and his father, Dawud, did litigation support for law firms. By all accounts, they raised Burke and his two younger siblings in a strict but supportive household. Colleen encouraged her kids to find creative outlets and pursue their passions, while Dawud stressed the importance of discipline and hard work. The Burkes were also very religious, with Dawud occasionally serving as a Pentecostal preacher. The only music allowed in the home was classical and gospel. Ore-Oluwa Oyinloye, a close childhood friend, remembers once trying to talk to Burke about Lil Wayne. Burke replied, “I don’t know who that is.”
Only after hearing someone play Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang” on the school bus in seventh grade did Burke seek out other music. He got on SoundCloud and developed an appetite for 2010s internet rappers like XXXTentacion and pop-punk bands like Paramore.
But two secular exceptions had been made in Burke’s cultural diet: video games and anime. Dawud was a devotee of both. He maintained a collection of video-game consoles and let Burke stay up past his bedtime to watch Dragon Ball Z. In fifth grade, Burke started reading manga, which inspired him to start writing his own stories and poems.
Oyinloye remembers Burke as a “nerdy type.” Another former classmate, who requested anonymity, still recalls the sting of Burke loudly calling them a “loser” unprovoked in a full classroom. “He wasn’t super outgoing and talented,” the classmate says, remembering the classroom outburst as a surprise act of bullying.
Burke, who spoke extensively about his upbringing in interviews, once claimed that he struggled to focus and racked up bad grades, leading his parents to homeschool him after seventh grade. He hated it at first, and asserted that after leaving middle school he never heard from his supposed friends again. (Oyinloye disputes this version of events, saying he reached out to Burke but never heard back.) But Burke eventually came to see his isolation as a blessing: There was more time for video games and the internet.
Burke in 7th Grade Anthony Middle School While Burke learned parkour at a local gym, his social life migrated online. He lived vicariously through the people he befriended through multiplayer games like Fortnite and Call of Duty. “Everybody I met online was older — it was like these adults and teenagers and people going through different situations, and they would just vent to you on the game,” Burke said in 2023. “And I’m like 15, 14, so I don’t know how to be a therapist! But I’m taking this information from all these different people talking to me about problems and situations. I’m like, ‘Wow, this is really what humans are like.’”
Hoping to become a professional gamer, Burke began uploading Fortnite videos in 2018. He hid it from his parents until he’d garnered enough attention, and some money, to assure them his hobby wasn’t frivolous.
Making music, however, didn’t interest Burke until it made him a star. Growing up, he sang in the church choir but quit because he got bored. Same with piano lessons and playing flute in the middle school band. “Every single opportunity I had to be a musical kid, it never clicked,” he said in 2025. It only clicked in a moment of desperation. After copyright strikes hit the popular songs he used to soundtrack his Fortnite montages, his mom offered a solution: Make your own music.
Using a free beat, the entry-level recording app BandLab, and his sister’s closet as a makeshift booth, Burke recorded his first song, “Run Away,” in late 2021. It got a few thousand streams on SoundCloud, so he made another, “You and I.” That track gained traction through a gaming montage Burke gave the clicky title “First Fortnite player to use his own song in a video.” Other players started using it, too, because it was royalty-free.
Burke kept making music, and eventually sought inspiration elsewhere. “Here With Me,” inspired by the opening sequence of the Disney-Pixar movie Up, became his biggest track to date. Calls started flooding in from prospective managers and labels. He signed with Josh Marshall and his management company, Mogul Vision. Darkroom Records, the Interscope imprint best known for signing Billie Eilish, announced a multimillion-dollar deal in September 2022.
“When we first met David, he seemed hyperintelligent,” the Darkroom/Interscope source tells Rolling Stone. “He was just an artist that seemed to be blazing his own path.” (The singer’s parents and managers at Mogul Vision did not respond to requests for comment.)
Meanwhile, “Romantic Homicide,” which had been building momentum since the summer, cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 2022. The ballad encapsulates D4vd’s appeal: moody, intimate bedroom pop for young people just emerging from a pandemic that had kept them confined within their homes, phones, and feelings for the better part of two years. Burke pushes his voice high before the melody falls into a callous lullaby: “In the back of my mind/I killed you/And I didn’t even regret it.”
Dark Impulses
Rivas Hernandez was not the only girl to catch Burke’s attention online. Jane, who requested a pseudonym to protect her privacy, had messaged him as a fan around the time “Romantic Homicide” went viral in the summer of 2022. They were soon texting privately and talking on the phone.
One day, Jane noticed an icon on his Twitch stream. It was Itami, Burke’s manga-style alter ego in a blindfold and red bow tie. Burke had spent months developing the character, unveiling him as a knife-wielding apparition in the “Romantic Homicide” video. Part of the fledgling “D4vdverse” Burke was creating alongside his music, Itami was the singer’s evil doppelgänger who would surface randomly and commit crimes, he explained. “He wears a blindfold for the sole purpose of not being held accountable for the pain he causes,” Burke wrote on YouTube.
“We were joking around,” Jane says, “and I said, ‘I would win in a karate fight with Itami.’ David said I could never beat Itami in a fight.”
What Burke wrote next was, in retrospect, ominous. “He joked about him and Itami doing a violent act toward me, cutting my arms off. It was a joke, but it came out of nowhere,” Jane says. Burke was 18 at the time, and she was two years younger. The comment left her confused, but she thought they were teasing each other, and Burke was known for having a dark sense of humor.
“It’s really eerie to look back on,” Jane says, adding that “the whole [Itami] character” seemed to reflect “what allegedly happened” to Rivas Hernandez. “When the autopsy report got released, and it showed how her arms were cut off, I was like, ‘This is insane.’ When I saw that, my heart dropped.”
Jane now wonders what prompted Burke to joke about dismemberment with her. “Was it his subconscious wanting to do that?” she tells Rolling Stone. “I don’t know.”
According to Jane, Burke was generally a caring and attentive friend, but also stern. He opposed smoking and drinking, was extremely religious, and said he’d never had a girlfriend before. When he was in a bad mood, she says, he preferred to pray instead of talk. Though their relationship was online and over text, Jane and Burke grew close over several months. Then, in mid-2023, he abruptly told Jane he needed some space, explaining that they weren’t at the same “maturity level.”
“He joked about doing a violent act on me, cutting my arms off. It’s very eerie to look back on.”
“He basically said that in a few years, my whole perspective might change on everything,” she recalls. “He said once I’m out of high school, we could see if we could be friends again.” For the moment, though, they were in different stages of life. “He was touring, he had a music career starting. I was in high school, not really able to travel around to even hang out,” she recalls him saying.
Jane says she felt hurt by the sharp cooling in their friendship. But she also took Burke’s words to be sincere, considering them wise at the time. Unbeknownst to her, Burke allegedly began his sexual relationship with Rivas Hernandez a short time later. “I feel like she got the worst version of him. A different version,” Jane says. “It’s just really shocking and saddening.”
Initially reluctant to speak for this article and fearing her words might be misinterpreted, Jane says she stepped forward so others might feel less alone in their shock and confusion over the alleged murder. She hopes her experience might prompt others to come forward, too, so there’s a full accounting of what happened for Rivas Hernandez’s family.
“Sometimes the people who influence you or help shape parts of you can also become people you don’t recognize anymore. And it’s really difficult to process,” she says. “Everything new I hear feels so unexpected.”
A Bloody Vision
Monsoon clouds gathered over Phoenix as Burke arrived to shoot the video for “Romantic Homicide” in August 2022. The video’s lead actress, Camille, remembers the sky finally erupting as they filmed a scene outdoors. “I was covered in blood, it was pouring rain, and I was soaked,” says Camille, who asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy. “I thought we were making art.”
In the finished video, Burke, as his blindfolded Itami character, walks down a street while lightning ripples across the sky. He drags a suitcase that later crashes open to reveal an arsenal of knives. In one of the last shots, Camille’s character lies flat on a bed with stab wounds dotting her abdomen. Itami looms over her. A bloody knife drops from his hand.
“I never took it literally,” Camille says. “I honestly related to it, because sometimes you have to kill someone in your mind and get over it, you know?”
Now, though, the parallels between the video and Rivas Hernandez’s alleged murder are unmistakable. Camille can still picture Burke standing over her, fake blood smeared across her dress. “It’s crazy I was in that situation,” she says, wondering if Burke used the shoot to reveal a “darker side of him wanting to come out.” Perhaps, she says, it offered a glimpse into his “internal demons.”
Long before his music career took off, Burke exhibited a fascination with violence. By his own admission, his earliest stories and poems scared teachers. “I read a lot of gory science-fiction, graphic novels, and Japanese manga,” he told Hunger in 2022. “I’d be writing my journals, letting them read them, and they’d hate my stuff sometimes.”
The fascination persisted, though Burke often undercut it with humor and self-deprecation. In September 2022, he posted a poem to Twitter, written from the point of view of a mannequin who’d been dragged into a dark room and torn “piece by piece, limb by limb.” He captioned it, “I’m so weird bro.”
“I love gore,” he later confessed on a Discord server, known as “d4vd’s closet,” in February 2023. “I used to be addicted to watching gore vids.”
After “Romantic Homicide,” Itami returned often as the vicious culprit in D4vd’s videos. In the animated clip for his song “Rehab,” Itami severs a girl’s forearm, then spears her stomach with a flying sword. In the 2025 visual for “One More Dance,” filmed three months before Rivas Hernandez’s death, Burke plays Itami again, wearing a blood-drenched shirt and dragging D4vd’s own body before it is stuffed into a car trunk.
Sources who worked with Burke say he controlled his aesthetic direction as an artist. Like Camille, they viewed his dark themes as an expression of adolescent alienation rooted in the art and media that influenced him.
“He was very inspired by video games and anime, so a lot of the choices for his creative were built off of that,” says the Darkroom/Interscope source. “Looking back, it’s quite shocking, but at the time, it was just an artist making art similar to the things he was inspired by. And it’s our job to empower the artist’s creativity.”
‘Delete Everything’
In the predawn hours of Jan. 11, 2024, Andre (who requested a pseudonym, citing privacy concerns) was coming off a marathon night of gaming when a notification appeared on his phone: D4vd, his favorite artist at the time, was live on Twitch.
Onscreen, based on a recording shared with Rolling Stone, Burke sat in the kitchen of the West Hollywood house next to a girl in black-rimmed glasses and a hoodie that covered most of her dark, curly hair. Burke talked about food, read viewer comments, and occasionally chatted with the girl next to him.
“They were flirting a little bit,” remembers Andre. Soon, fans started to interject, apparently trolling Burke by invoking convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And they recognized the girl: “They were typing out, ‘Celeste.’ They were saying, ‘Celeste.’ I had no idea what it meant,” Andre says.
At one point, the girl made a comment that alarmed Burke. While Andre doesn’t remember the exact statement, the recording shows Burke turned to the girl and described the remark as too “controversial” for the stream.
“It’s controversial of raping kids?” she replied, laughing and covering her face with her hand. Burke displayed a dumbfounded grin, then brought the stream to a close. He told the moderators, “Delete everything, everything goes.”
That same week, Rivas Hernandez allegedly got an abortion. According to text messages recovered from Burke’s phone, the teenager began to fear she was pregnant in November 2023. Burke responded by telling her to track her menstrual cycle with an app. When Rivas Hernandez scheduled the abortion, he appeared to coach her through the ordeal, praising her strength and telling her he loved her. He also texted that his mother would want him to ask, “It is mine right?”
The text exchanges show Burke oscillating between tenderness and control in subsequent months. He would dangle a future together, then turn cold or sermonizing. In June 2024, when Rivas Hernandez worried that the first abortion hadn’t been successful, Burke appeared to mock her: “You would have a baby bump lmao you had hella periods since then. What the fuck you smoke?… Nah first baby gone.”
Later that month, Rivas Hernandez asked, “Ur mom know we had sex yet.” Burke replied, “She thinks that’s the first thing we gonna do when we see each other.” Rivas Hernandez again expressed anxiety about contraception: “I can see u and sleep over, just don’t get me pregnant.” Burke responded, “We’ve done a good job the past few months baby … The last and only time u were pregnant was because of a fucked up condom in December.”
On the morning of June 27, Rivas Hernandez texted Burke that she had to run to the bathroom after they last had sex because “it hurt…SO MUCH.” Burke was dismissive. “NUH,” he replied in all caps. “I remember every time when you say ow when we fuck. … And last time u aint say ow once.”
That night, Burke opened a three-date run at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. Rivas Hernandez was there, and her presence was no secret. She sat in a box with his family and appears in a photo — shared at the time on Discord and later reviewed by Rolling Stone — watching Burke perform from the wings. Burke’s manager, Robert Morgenroth, stands nearby. Burke’s brother, Caleb, was also at the show and confirmed her attendance in an Instagram post. (Neither Morgenroth’s lawyer nor Caleb responded to requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)
A little more than a week later, Rivas Hernandez asked over text, “Does anyone know we even had sex?” Burke allegedly replied, “Nope, and I would like to keep it that way before we married.”
“I did not get David. I got a still-faced demon — soulless, uncomfortable. Like a ghost in human form.”
The relationship continued to unfold in and out of public view. In late July, Burke was photographed at an influencer’s birthday party with a girl resembling Rivas Hernandez. The pair wear matching headscarves, and the girl turns from the camera, a diamond ring on the hand she uses to cover her face. During an August trip to Vegas with Rivas Hernandez, Burke dropped into his fan-based Discord server and said he was having a songwriting “crisis.” A member who has since deleted their profile responded, “Drop the one with the missing girl celeste rivas hernandez.”
By the end of the month, the tone of Rivas Hernandez’s messages had grown more anguished. On Aug. 30, she expressed regret over the abortion — “I killed my kid for you,” she wrote — and insisted that she “would have been there for it” had they proceeded with the pregnancy. Burke responded that she would have been acting “selfishly.”
“David, I’m going to have to lie to people around me, even my kid, for the rest of my life,” she texted back. “I don’t like talking about it because it gets me really upset, but I’d do anything to have it back.”
Burke’s reply was unsympathetic. “Let’s end that there,” he allegedly texted. “I don’t like talking to u when you’re upset.” When Rivas Hernandez asked how he felt about the abortion, he allegedly replied, “I’m saddened by it. I’m even more saddened by the way it was conceived, outside of marriage and outside of the way I had pictured my first child going…. But I don’t dwell on it.”
Burke ended things with Rivas Hernandez in November 2024, but “continued to use the victim for sex,” Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman said at the preliminary hearing in July. Rivas Hernandez struggled with the arrangement. On March 14, 2025, she texted, “We can be friends but like online. I don’t want anything to do with you in person anymore if I’m gonna try and move on.”
Violent Art
On Jan. 19, 2025, as temperatures in Atlanta plunged into the 20s, a crew gathered at Bonfire ATL studios to film Burke’s video for “One More Dance,” a bleak ballad about a self-destructive romance. Those on set remember Burke’s detached calm. Quiet and withdrawn, with at least a half dozen recently acquired facial piercings, he retreated to an SUV whenever he was not needed.
The video opens with Itami dragging a half-conscious Burke by his legs and delivering him to a young couple on a crime spree. The couple load Burke into the trunk of a car, steal shovels from a store, and bury their victim alive.
What stayed with multiple crew members was Burke’s ease with the trunk scene. He climbed inside without hesitation and appeared unfazed as the door shut over him. “He was just so comfortable in the trunk,” one crew member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says. “He just hops in, of his own free will. It was so weird.”
The crew member says they never saw a trace of the cheerful young artist Burke projected in interviews and online. “I got Itami. I did not get David,” they say. “I got a still-faced demon — soulless, uncomfortable, eerie. Like a ghost in a human form.”
When prosecutors outlined their case, parallels with the “One More Dance” video stood out. They allege that after Burke stabbed Rivas Hernandez, he drove north on the 101 Freeway to an area near Lake Cachuma in Santa Barbara County, where a transit worker later found Rivas Hernandez’s passport card. The following day, he allegedly purchased a shovel from Home Depot and had it delivered via Postmates.
Like in the video, he allegedly placed Rivas Hernandez’s dismembered remains in the trunk of his Tesla, where they sat decomposing for “several weeks, possibly months,” prosecutors say. He then “lied to friends, business associates, and others,” they say, whenever anyone “noticed the strong smell of decay in and around his home and vehicle.”
One such instance even may have been captured on camera. A now-deleted video stream, clipped and shared online, shows Burke at his house with friends on July 4, 2025. As the group mills around, Burke jokes: “I apologize to everyone for the way my bathroom smell. I took a shit in there like two hours ago.”
An LAPD criminalist who testified at the preliminary hearing said Rivas Hernandez’s DNA was collected from suspected bloodstains found around Burke’s garage, including on a rowing machine, a Tesla charger, a green tarp, a black rubber floor mat, and a Clorox-style cleaning wipe. The expert added that Burke’s DNA profile was included in a mixture from four people found on the outside of a garbage bag that held a second bag containing the wipe. Bits of the inflatable pool were found embedded in Rivas Hernandez’s severed limbs, another criminalist testified.
A Grim Discovery
Residents remembered seeing the black, dented 2023 Tesla Model X with Texas plates parked around the upscale Bird Streets neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills as far back as May 2025. “It moved around” until it was parked by a tall hedge, and sat there for weeks, one source told Rolling Stone last September, adding, “It’s chilling.”
At the end of July, right before he embarked on the Withered tour, Burke allegedly parked the car by the hedge near his rental home and was captured on video walking back to the house. He played a show in Indianapolis the day the car was tagged as abandoned, and performed in Madison, Wisconsin, the night before the police opened the trunk and found Rivas Hernandez’s body.
Initial headlines were vague but harrowing. The victim was so badly decomposed, the medical examiner couldn’t even estimate her age or ethnicity. Sources close to Burke told Rolling Stone and other outlets that he was aware of the situation and “cooperating” with authorities, but police later disputed that.
Crocs and Hollister immediately pulled campaigns with Burke. The rest of his skyrocketing career started to collapse after authorities formally identified Rivas Hernandez on Sept. 16. The final three shows of Burke’s Withered tour were canceled, and a deluxe edition of the album was shelved. Kali Uchis had their collaboration, “Crashing,” removed from streaming services.
At his label, “confusion” and “shock” quickly gave way to resolve, according to the Darkroom/Interscope source. The decision to drop Burke came soon after Rivas Hernandez was identified, they say, though it took several months, and the involvement of label lawyers, to formally sever the relationship.
“Right away, it was very apparent, due to all the social media and pictures that we were seeing, that he was [sexually] involved with her, and we made a choice immediately to step away from him and his business,” the source says. “When there’s a 14-year-old girl involved with an artist, it’s pretty simple.”
The source claims it was a total break: “We ceased all communication with him and his team the second the news of Celeste came out, and there’s been zero communication since.”
Burke quickly disappeared from the public eye, though he initially was not named as a suspect in the case. Prosecutors convened a secret grand jury in November, but it wasn’t until his family challenged their subpoenas that unsealed court filings identified Burke as the target of a murder probe. Investigators guarded the case so closely they secured a rare court order preventing the medical examiner’s office from releasing Rivas Hernandez’s autopsy findings. The office vocally opposed the security hold, saying it harmed the agency’s commitment to “full transparency.”
Though Rivas Hernandez’s death was officially ruled a homicide in December 2025, the determination was sealed for months, even from her family. When it finally became public in April, after Burke’s arrest, the medical examiner called it “unfathomable” that the teen’s parents “had to wait this long to learn what happened to their daughter.”
The Face of Evil?
In March, as the criminal investigation dragged on and many wondered if Burke would ever face charges, Jane, the girl who frequently messaged with Burke before Rivas Hernandez, dreamt about him on his birthday. When she woke up, she texted him a Bible verse: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Though they hadn’t communicated in more than a year, Burke replied to Jane quickly. “To see you quote scripture is a joy,” he wrote back, she says. “I thank God, for greatly you have blessed me more than you know to see how the Father can shine a light through me that brings more glory to Him than can ever be brought to me. I pray He keeps you in His arms and that you continue to abide in Him.”
“It was definitely shocking, because I didn’t think he’d even respond or talk to anyone. I didn’t think I’d ever hear from him again,” Jane says. She believes Burke was leaning heavily on his faith as the walls closed in. “Religion is like the one thing that he’ll always have,” she says.
When Burke was arrested a few weeks later, on April 16, he appeared in court flanked by two prominent defense attorneys, Blair Berk and Marilyn Bednarski, and pleaded not guilty to all charges: first-degree murder, continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14, and unlawful mutilation of human remains.
The next day, a lawyer for Burke’s family said his parents “fully stand behind him and believe that he is innocent.” But Colleen and Dawud have yet to appear at any of his court dates. In testimony, LAPD detective Corey Farrell claimed Colleen was aware of her son’s relationship with Rivas Hernandez.
On Instagram, Burke’s younger brother, Caleb, admitted to being “around Celeste a few times,” but insisted he “did not know her well and did not know her age.” He refuted claims he “knew what was going on and was protecting” his brother.
“This is not true at all. I have not lived with my brother for years and was not very close with him,” he wrote. “We didn’t speak often other than when our family was brought on tour or he was visiting home.”
Caleb also denied exploiting the case for publicity when he attempted to launch his own music career in the wake of Rivas Hernandez’s death. “I want justice for Celeste and her family,” he wrote on Instagram.
Burke at his arraignment in April. Ted Soqui/Pool/AP ‘Mountain of Evidence’
One of the most unnerving aspects of the case is the sheer number of people who witnessed Rivas Hernandez spending significant time with Burke as his fame exploded. She was a middle school runaway, but if she or Burke told people she was an adult, it appears they accepted that as fact.
Family friend Rubi Alonso tells Rolling Stone Rivas Hernandez was “very studious” as a child. And perhaps their age difference didn’t register for some because Burke often acted like a kid himself. Even as his career took off, he was still playing Fortnite, still singing songs about the movie Up, still putting Hello Kitty stickers on his face.
“The stuff that you see on the internet, of him in interviews and posting on social media, that is the exact same way he was behind the scenes,” the Darkroom/Interscope source claims. “I’m not sure if that was a performance, but for us, it was just a normal artist, a seemingly great kid from a really good family, just hustling…. We didn’t see any warning signs.”
Even in the days following the alleged murder, people at the label found Burke to be “extremely normal,” the source adds. “It didn’t seem like there was anything wrong,” they say, shaking their head over a Zoom call. “So of course, looking back in a situation like that, it’s very wild that he could have potentially committed such a harsh crime.… It’s a heartbreaking situation.”
Collins, the streamer who’d seen the missing-person flyer, claimed on Twitch that she was “blindsided” when the girl in the trunk turned out to be Rivas Hernandez. She called Burke a “genuine psychopath” on her July stream and claimed she cooperated with investigators.
Rivas Hernandez’s parents, meanwhile, have remained in near seclusion, though they did attend each day of the preliminary hearing, which ended with a judge ruling there was enough evidence to send Burke to trial. (As of press time, a trial date was not set.) They sat in the front row, next to their attorney, Patrick Steinfeld, with Rivas Hernandez’s mom sometimes breaking down in tears.
“Celeste was a beautiful 14-year-old girl. She was full of life and energy, and she brought a lot of love and joy into the family home,” Steinfeld told Rolling Stone after one of the days of testimony. “They have a hole in their heart that will never be replaced.”
At the preliminary hearing in July, Burke’s defense highlighted evidence that Rivas Hernandez had invited herself to Burke’s house the night she was allegedly killed. They also suggested that she may have been suicidal and somehow killed herself — a claim Steinfeld called “disturbing.”
“The family was horrified that the defense attorneys brought up evidence to put the blame on a 14-year-old child,” he said.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, say a “mountain of evidence” points to Burke, and his financial motive was clear. If the relationship became public, Silverman argued, Burke stood to lose his lucrative recording contract, including two remaining album options worth up to $12 million.
“D4vd allegedly squandered his fame and fortune by brutally killing a young girl because he feared their illicit sexual relationship would ruin his aspiring career. The only headlines that will accompany his stage name from here forward will be about the vicious murder of a young girl,” Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said after the five-day hearing. If convicted as charged, Burke faces life in prison without parole, or the death penalty. (Prosecutors have yet to say if they will seek a death sentence.)
For those who feared Rivas Hernandez’s death might go unsolved, Burke’s arrest has offered something to hold onto. It’s not comfort, exactly, but the possibility of answers. And if prosecutors find evidence implicating others, they hope the case won’t end with Burke.
“I hope that anyone involved in any way, shape, or form is held accountable,” Jane says, “so Celeste Rivas Hernandez can receive justice.”
