The musician David Anthony Burke, otherwise known as D4VD, rose to fame because of his song Romantic Homicide in July of 2022. After this song debuted, he continued to gain more recognition for his music and his streaming on Twitch. His music has many recurring themes such as “horror” mixed with romance, hence song titles like Romantic Homicide.
On August 27, D4VD’s Tesla was noted by parking enforcement. Then, on September 3rd, a citation was issued on the vehicle, and two days later, the car was impounded. After only a couple of days in the tow yard, a worker reported an awful smell, like rotting, coming from the car. Once the Los Angeles police arrived and obtained a search warrant, they found a very heavily decomposed Celeste Rivas Hernandez in the trunk. Unfortunately, she was found just a day before her 15th birthday.
All of this being in the public eye prompted multiple news articles, left die-hard fans in shambles, and sent families into grieving. Fans on social media, specifically TikTok, started going back through years and years of posts to find some sort of evidence that D4VD is innocent; that he would never do it, he would never even be around a poor 14-year-old girl, and he would never ever get matching tattoos with her. Unfortunately, their hopes were crushed. All the time and effort they spent finding his innocence was simply a waste. There were the Twitch streams of them together, the matching tattoos, the Instagram posts with her, the songs published on her birthday, the unreleased songs with her name in it, saying he was obsessed with her, and the fans having videos of her being backstage at his shows. All of this made the public go crazy with wonder if he did actually do it? Fans wanted to believe he would never be with a middle-schooler in such an awful way. This sent social media into a frenzy with everyone going back years on Instagram and through TikTok reposts to discover his songs being released on her birthday. Knowing his whole career is the horror romance aesthetic, finding some lyrics about creepy things mixed with being in love is only natural, but it becomes very different when someone finds a rotting body in your car.
In this case, social media has played a huge part in the increasing interest in this story. Because the alleged killer is a very popular singer or Twitch streamer, even if you don’t know his name or listen to his songs, you most likely have at least heard them somewhere without realizing it until this all happened. To me, one of the most interesting things about this. That is how fast people were able to solve this, faster than the actual police, even. It took less than a week for people to find unreleased songs, old texts between the two, and even his Twitch clips with her in them.
As of November, 18th, 2025 he was finally named as a suspect for the death and disappearance of Celeste. The also stated that he has not been cooperating with the LAPD like he had stated on his social media.
There are so many complex layers to this case. It’s an extremely awful thing to happen to such a young girl. She didn’t even make it to fifteen years old. Social media posts indicate that they had been together since Celeste was twelve years old and that they met when David was seventeen years old. Without a doubt, more developments in this case should be coming soon.
