EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes graphic and disturbing details.
The lengthy argument between the young musician who created the anthem for Fortnite and the teenage runaway on April 22, 2025, would mark the end of a turbulent relationship.
The fight was chronicled in text messages that suggested Celeste Rivas Hernandez was jealous of singer-songwriter d4vd’s relationship with other women, according to a nine-page brief laying out the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s evidence to support charging him with the 14-year-old’s murder. The artist, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke, had “led her to believe they had a future together.”
Extremely upset, Celeste “threatened to disclose damaging information about her relationship” with then-20-year-old d4vd “to end his career and destroy his life,” the brief said.
His first studio album, “Withered,” was to be released just days after the dispute, setting in motion the horrific final hours of Celeste’s life – one prosecutors say ended when the teen girl was fatally stabbed and then dismembered in an inflatable pool with chainsaws ordered from Amazon.
“He had an emerging multi-million-dollar career already in progress,” according to the brief. “He also had multiple product endorsements which were highly profitable.”
The killing likely took place on April 23, 2025, according to the prosecution. The next night, d4vd had an album release party before departing on an international tour in late July.
Text messages suggested d4vd had manipulated Celeste, even after their breakup in November 2024, the prosecution wrote. Their text exchanges continued, as did their sexual relationship, according to the brief. In one text, Celeste wrote, “all we do is have sex and just hang out man I want more than that for myself.”
D4vd, now 21, and Celeste met three years earlier in 2022. She was just 11 at the time, according to the brief. Prosecutors say they began a sexual relationship in November 2023; he was 18 and she was 13.
Celeste would soon set out on her troubled journey as a runaway from Lake Elsinore in Riverside County, California. D4vd, a bedroom pop artist with a multi-million-dollar record deal, was on the verge of global stardom.
Also in November 2023, he made his late-night television debut on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and performed his breakthrough hit, “Romantic Homicide.” In the song’s music video, d4vd stands over the bloodied body of a woman in a white dress as he sings, “In the back of my mind, I killed you / And I didn’t even regret it.”
D4vd was arrested in April and has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder with special circumstances, continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14 and mutilating human remains. After his arraignment, Blair Berk, a lawyer for the singer, maintained d4vd’s innocence, saying in a statement evidence “will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivas Hernandez and he was not the cause of her death.”
Celeste was reported missing by family and friends on several occasions, starting in early 2024. Her dismembered remains were found in the trunk of d4vd’s impounded Tesla in Los Angeles on September 8, 2025, a day after she would have turned 15.
On the night after the April 2025 argument, d4vd sent an Uber to Celeste’s home in Lake Elsinore to take her to his home in the Hollywood Hills, according to the prosecution’s brief. She was dropped off at his home around 10:10 p.m.
“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,” the prosecution wrote in the brief.
In the days after the killing, d4vd purchased online “two chainsaws,” along with “a body bag, heavy-duty laundry bags, and a blue inflatable pool,” according to the prosecution.
D4vd then “took horrifying measures to destroy and discard the victim’s body,” the prosecution said.
“After placing her body into the blue inflatable pool to prevent her blood from spilling onto his garage floor,” the brief said, “defendant used a chainsaw and perhaps other tools to cut off her limbs.”
Small blue plastic fragments were embedded in Celeste’s remains. An expert with Los Angeles police made “a physical fit match … to the blue inflatable pool” in which Celeste was dismembered, according to the prosecution.
D4vd then allegedly cut off her left ring and pinky fingers because her ring finger had a tattoo of his name. “Her fingers have not been recovered,” the prosecution wrote.
Part of her body was stuffed into the cadaver bag; other parts into a garbage bag. D4vd then placed the bags into the front trunk of his Tesla – the cadaver bag on top – leaving the body to decompose, according to the prosecution.
As weeks passed, prosecutors allege, d4vd “lied to friends, business associates, and others who noticed the strong smell of decay in and around his home and vehicle.”
Before embarking on his concert tour at the end of July 2025, the singer-songwriter parked the Tesla around the corner from his home. When police found Celeste’s remains in the trunk, she was in an “advanced state of decomposition,” the medical examiner’s report said.
“There are no words to express the indescribable pain the family is experiencing right now,” a lawyer for Celeste’s family, Patrick Steinfeld, said in a statement. “They still have bills to pay and jobs they go to every day. All they want is time to grieve and heal.”
CNN’s Kyung Lah, Alaa Elassar, Zoe Sottile and Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.
