Seven months after a tow yard worker cracked open an abandoned Tesla in Hollywood and found a little girl rotting in the trunk, the LAPD finally put handcuffs on the man who owned that car.
D4vd is in jail.
The Los Angeles Police Department announced Thursday, April 16, 2026 that 21 year old David Anthony Burke, the viral singer behind “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me,” was arrested on suspicion of murdering 14 year old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. He is being held without bail. The case is being presented to the LA County District Attorney’s office Monday for filing consideration.
Celeste Rivas Hernandez was a child from Lake Elsinore, California who first went missing in April 2024. Her mother told police her daughter had a boyfriend named “David.” By September 8, 2025, Celeste was a body in a black bag stuffed into the front trunk of a Tesla abandoned on Bluebird Avenue in the Hollywood Hills. A tow yard worker caught the smell. That is how the world found her.
The car had been sitting on that street since late July 2025, right around the time D4vd kicked off his Withered World Tour. It got ticketed for violating the 72 hour parking ordinance, towed to a Hollywood yard, and that is when detectives walked up on one of the most disturbing celebrity cases in recent memory.
Her remains were dismembered. LAPD later confirmed she was not decapitated and not frozen, shutting down some of the rumors flying around the internet. Investigators have also said they believe more than one person helped dispose of the body.
Celeste’s family said the two were dating. They had matching tattoos. Her brother told NBCLA she disappeared after D4vd picked her up in his Tesla. Investigators say she was still alive as recently as January 2025, months after her mother last heard from her in May 2024.
Then there is the unreleased song. A track titled “Celeste” leaked online back in December 2023 and resurfaced after her body was found. The lyrics are chilling in hindsight. D4vd sings about a girl with his name tattooed on her chest and about being obsessed with her. His camp has never cleanly addressed the track.
There is also the Discord receipt. Celeste was allegedly in D4vd’s official Discord server as early as 2022 under the username “Celeste,” where other users openly called her his girlfriend. In the summer of 2024, after she was already reported missing, an anonymous user in that same server told D4vd to “drop the one with the missing girl Celeste Rivas Hernandez.” He never responded.
Anyone paying attention saw this arrest coming. LA prosecutors led by Beth Silverman have been running a grand jury for months, pulling in witnesses including Robert Morgenroth, the general manager at Mogul Vision, who was grilled on why nobody at the label called police. A key witness and former close friend of D4vd, 23 year old streamer Neo Langston, got picked up in Montana earlier this year for ditching his subpoena.
On November 24, 2025, the LAPD officially called the case a murder investigation. Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said accountability was coming and that nobody was off the table, including Burke. He was not lying.
D4vd was a streaming giant. “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” each racked up over 1.5 billion streams on Spotify. He opened for SZA. He played Coachella in 2025. He hit the Paris Fashion Week circuit. Darkroom and Interscope signed him when he was still a teenager making songs on a free app to cover his Fortnite montages.
All of that is frozen now. His label has gone silent. His tour was canceled. He hired Blair Berk, the go to criminal defense attorney for celebrities. And he is sitting in an LA jail cell while a 14 year old girl’s family waits for the DA to make it official.
Celeste Rivas Hernandez deserved to grow up. Instead she became a trunk in a tow yard and a hashtag. The arrest is late. The questions about how a minor ended up entangled with a grown artist, how she went missing multiple times with nobody in his circle picking up a phone, and how a body sat in a Tesla for weeks on a public street while this man toured the country, those questions are still wide open.
Monday the DA decides what charges stick.
