After spending four days in prison, since he was arrested on Thursday afternoon in a house in the Hollywood Hills, this Monday the musician known as D4VD, real name David Anthony Burke, has been formally charged with murder by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, with aggravating circumstances that could send him to prison for life. Seven months have passed since the body of a teenager, Celeste Rivas Hernández, was found in the trunk of his Tesla.
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Los Angeles District Attorney, Nathan Hochman, accuses Burke, 21, of murder with three aggravating circumstances in a case being handled by the city’s Major Crimes office. “It’s a horrible and brutal murder,” Hochman stated, assuring that D4VD faces “the most serious charges, first-degree murder with special circumstances,” which means he faces the “maximum sentence, death penalty or life imprisonment without possibility of parole.” Hochman explained that among these special circumstances are that the murder “was committed for financial reasons” and also that this is the murder of a crime witness, in this case, the young woman herself. According to Hochman, Burke had committed sexual crimes against Celeste Rivas.
According to the prosecutor, Rivas went to Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills on April 23, 2025, and that was the last time she was seen alive. By September, he explained, her remains appeared “dismembered and decomposed in the trunk of a car registered under Burke’s name.” From there, “an investigation into who killed Celeste, which has lasted months and months,” began. Hochman acknowledged that, as a father of three children, “this is every parent’s nightmare.”
The prosecutor also spoke about the pain of the Rivas Hernández family: “Their grief is unfathomable for what happened to their daughter.” According to Hochman, all units have worked together without any disagreement. They have witnesses and evidence, they assure, but he has also asked for public cooperation: “If there is anyone out there who has information, please go to a police station.”
The police chief explained that the investigation has lasted seven months and that they have been heavily criticized for not arresting Burke seven months ago, when Celeste Rivas’s body was found, but he explained that they did not want to “do or say anything that would jeopardize the case.” “Our investigators have faced an extremely difficult case,” he recounted, revealing that much of the evidence was already missing, and that there has been a lot of false information surrounding the case.
Two years ago, Celeste Rivas, then a 13-year-old teenager, disappeared from her home in Lake Elsinore, a small California town of 50,000 inhabitants, about 120 kilometers southeast of Los Angeles. Her family and friends reported her disappearance and searched for her, without clues. That was on April 5, 2024. And a year and a half later, on September 8, 2025, her body, dismembered and in an advanced state of decomposition, appeared in D4VD’s car. The Tesla brand car had been abandoned on the street for several weeks, until neighbors reported it and the municipal tow truck took it to a depot. There, a few days later, a strong smell caught the attention of the workers, who upon opening the trunk discovered the body, which turned out to be that of the young Rivas. The day before, she would have turned 15.
At that time, Burke was not arrested because, as the Los Angeles police department explained then, it was unclear whether he “had criminal culpability or not” in the case, “beyond the concealment of the body.” The details of Rivas’s autopsy were not made public, by court order, as the police explained.
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The singer never reported the theft or disappearance of his vehicle. During the summer of 2025, he was immersed in a tour across much of the United States where he presented his new album, Withered, released in April 2025, which reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and accumulated over 520 million streams on Spotify. He performed concerts throughout August and had fifteen planned for September; in fact, he was in Minneapolis when the police searched the car. The tour was canceled after the body appeared. In 2025, Burke became the most searched person on Google worldwide.
In fact, D4VD —who performed at Coachella in 2025 and is the creator of the anthem for the popular video game Fortnite— had about twenty shows planned in Europe, starting in Oslo, Norway, on October 1, and ending in Warsaw, Poland, on November 4. Everything was canceled, as were some of his commercial collaborations with brands like Hollister and Crocs, which removed his image from their campaigns. Darkroom/Interscope record labels, Universal Music subsidiaries, also decided to dispense with him and pause all his promotional activities last year, and Sony did so just a few days ago, after his detention without bail.
The relationship between Burke and Rivas is unknown, as is the timeline of events. Before the young woman disappeared, in January 2024, both appeared together, singing and chatting, in a live video on the Twitch platform. In it, D4VD is heard saying: “Delete everything.” From then until March 2024, the musician’s car could be seen around Rivas’s house in Lake Elsinore, as CNN explains. And, after her disappearance, in June 2024, the girl could be seen at a concert by the musician at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. According to the same outlet, a private investigator discovered images of them together in both December 2024 and January 2025. According to TMZ, Rivas had told her mother that she was dating someone named David, without further details.
The police have only provided certain data, but do not explain their exact relation to the case. For example, they have stated —as The New York Times explained after Burke’s arrest— that in the spring of 2025 the singer traveled north, to the Santa Barbara area. That information is related to the case, but it is not known how.
A grand jury has been investigating the case for several months, as demonstrated by a series of documents that became known in February, although Burke’s role in Rivas’s death is not known in them.
In a statement following D4VD’s arrest, his lawyers stated that “the current evidence in the case will show that David Burke did not kill Celeste Rivas nor was he the cause of her death.” He, for the moment, has not commented.
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