LOS ANGELES (CN) — Prosecutors began to lay out their case against singer D4vd in a brief filed Wednesday, detailing some of the evidence they plan to present to prove that the musician murdered a 14-year-old girl he was in a sexual relationship with, and later dismembered her corpse.
In the memo, prosecutors say D4vd, whose real name is David Anthony Burke, met Celeste Rivas Hernandez in 2022, when she was just 11 years old. They began a sexual relationship in 2023, when Burke was 18 and Hernandez was 13. She lived in Lake Elsinore, a small city roughly 70 miles east of Los Angeles.
In February 2024 Hernandez’s family reported her missing. Sheriff’s deputies found Burke’s phone number in her phone records and they contacted him, informing him that she was “a 13-year-old runaway.” Burke claimed that he hadn’t know she was a minor and didn’t know where she was. She returned home two days later.
Nevertheless, Burke continued to “pursue” Hernandez, prosecutors say. Her parents took her phone away, but the singer, according to the brief, drove to Lake Elsinore and paid one of Hernandez’s junior high school classmates $1,000 to give her a cellphone so that they could stay in touch.
“Throughout 2024, the victim spent a significant amount of time with defendant, including summer weekends at his home in the Hollywood Hills and traveling with him to Las Vegas, London and Texas to meet his family,” prosecutors write. “Text exchanges between the victim and defendant contain references to sex, pregnancy, abortion, and use of the Plan B emergency contraceptive. There are also explicit photographs documenting and corroborating their sexual relationship.”
The relationship was a stormy one, and the couple broke up in November 2024, although they remained in contact and likely continued to have sex, according to the brief. They argued frequently over text message. In March 2025, she texted him: “all we do is have sex and just hang out man I want more than that for myself.” Other texts revealed that she became jealous over his relationship with other women.
“She became extremely upset and threatened to disclose damaging information about her relationship with defendant to end his career and destroy his life,” prosecutors say in the brief.
Since he had known her, Burke’s career had been skyrocketing. He had first gained attention by creating videos of himself playing the online game Fortnite and posting them on YouTube, along with a self-made soundtrack. He then moved on to producing music for video games professionally; one of his tracks became the official Fortnite anthem. He had two multiplatinum singles in 2022, and his debut album was set to be released on April 25, 2025, just as Hernandez was threatening to expose him, according to prosecutors.
On April 23, he sent an Uber to pick her up from Lake Elsinore. It dropped her off at Burke’s home in the Hollywood Hills a little after 10 p.m., prosecutors say.
“Knowing he had to silence the victim before she ruined his music career as she had threatened, very soon after her arrival at his home, defendant stabbed the victim to death multiple times and stood by while she bled out,” prosecutors write in the memo.
Days later, Burke ordered a shovel from Home Depot that was delivered to his house by Postmates, according to the brief. A week later, he ordered two chainsaws from Amazon. Four days after that, he ordered “a body bag, heavy-duty laundry bags, and a blue inflatable pool,” also from Amazon. He appears to have taken quite a bit of time before dealing with the gruesome business of the body. On July 7 — more than two months after the murder — he ordered a “burn cage” from Amazon.
Prosecutors say that Burke laid Hernandez’s body in the blue inflatable pool in his garage, and then proceeded to cut off her head and limbs. Burke also removed her left ring and pinky fingers, “because her ring finger contained a tattoo of his name.” The fingers have not been recovered. He left the bags of her body parts in the trunk of his Tesla — for months, prosecutors say.
“For several weeks, or possibly months, defendant left the victim’s body to decompose inside his Tesla,” they write in the brief. “He lied to friends, business associates, and others who noticed the strong smell of decay in and around his home and vehicle. Before leaving on his concert tour at the end of July, he parked his Tesla on the street around the corner from his home.”
The car was towed to an impound lot. When the owner of the lot noticed the strong smell, he called the police, who “opened the Tesla’s front storage compartment and observed a black cadaver bag covered in insects.”
The memo describes some of the evidence collected by investigators, including surveillance video showing Burke was the last person to drive his Tesla, “photographs depicting the victim naked, as well as while she was engaged with defendant in sexual activity when she was 13,” and “DNA evidence developed from blood stains collected from defendant’s garage, which match the victim’s genetic profile.” The medical examiner also found “small blue plastic fragments” in Hernandez’s remains, believed to be tiny pieces of the inflatable pool.
At a hearing on Wednesday, Burke’s attorney Blair Berk pleaded with a Superior Court judge to keep the 9-page memo under seal.
“The prosecution has appeared to have filed a very unusual pre-preliminary hearing brief that appears to be a very one-sided view of what’s anticipated to be the evidence in this case,” Berk said.“We have a very real concern about the jury pool at a future trial being tainted.”
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Charlaine Olmedo was unimpressed with the request.
“This media attention is no different than the court has seen in other cases,” Olmedo said. “Any publicity concerns, the defense can address with potential jurors.”
The brief was released to the media less than an hour later.
Burke’s preliminary hearing had been scheduled for Friday. It’s now been moved to May 26.
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