A teen girl was found dead in a car owned by d4vd. CNN went to her hometown to investigate the mysterious link between her and the rising music star. Upgrade to watch the full report.
Los Angeles
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In the summer of 2024, a budding musical sensation known to his legion of mostly young fans as d4vd posted on social media that he was experiencing a case of writer’s block.
“I’m in a song crisis right now,” the entertainer, then 19, lamented on Discord.
Within minutes, one of his followers on the popular platform offered an oddly specific suggestion:
“Drop the one with the missing girl celeste rivas hernandez,” the anonymous user wrote, referring to a 13-year-old runaway whose face was plastered on “missing person” posters at the time.
The message went unaddressed by the singer, whose full name is David Anthony Burke.
But the cryptic—seemingly taunting—post has since emerged as an intriguing nugget in connection with a grand jury investigation in which prosecutors have deemed Burke a “target.”
That’s because about a year after the post mentioning Rivas, her dismembered and decomposed body was discovered in the trunk of Burke’s Tesla, which had been abandoned not far from the rented multimillion-dollar home where he was living in the glitzy Hollywood Hills overlooking Los Angeles. The car was eventually transferred to a tow yard, where an employee called police after noticing a foul smell emanating from the vehicle.
Following the grisly discovery in September, Burke canceled a world tour upon which he had just embarked. He has made no public comment in the months since.
Authorities investigating her death have been tight-lipped as well. A judge has ordered that the results of Rivas’ autopsy remain confidential at the request of the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division, which is investigating the young girl’s death.
Interest in the case, meanwhile, has exploded on the internet: The singer was the No. 1 searched person on Google worldwide for 2025 based on queries following the discovery of Rivas’ body. An army of amateur online sleuths has been parsing Burke’s lyrics, interviews and social media posts for clues, and the case has resulted in headlines in publications from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Post.
A CNN investigation, based on an extensive review of social media postings both by and about Burke, as well as more than a dozen interviews, found that Rivas repeatedly appeared in Burke’s orbit before and after she was reported missing for the first time in February of 2024.
She was just 13 years old when she appeared alongside Burke in a livestream video shot in the wee hours of the morning from inside a West Hollywood home linked to the entertainer. She was photographed backstage at one of his concerts a few months later and appeared in images on the memory card of a camera left behind at the singer’s home in the Hollywood Hills after news of her death became public.
CNN also used geolocation to verify Burke’s unexplained presence a few blocks from Rivas’ family home more than an hour’s drive from where he lived in Hollywood around the time the girl was reported missing.
Citing the ongoing grand jury probe, Burke’s attorney, Blair Berk, declined comment on any aspect of the case, including what relationship, if any, her client had with Rivas.
The singer and the runaway
Before one of his music videos went viral and made him an online phenomenon, Burke was a homeschooled teenager living in a devoutly religious household outside Houston. He was a gaming enthusiast and a lover of music.
A blend of those two passions led to him making music to accompany videos he posted of himself gaming, and in 2022, his debut single “Romantic Homicide” went viral on TikTok.
As his career took off, he moved to Los Angeles, where his management company rented a lavish house in the Hollywood Hills for $20,000 a month. He was living the fast-paced life of a young celebrity when Rivas somehow ended up in his orbit.
Lake Elsinore, California, Rivas’ hometown, is about a 90-minute drive from LA, but the working-class city feels a world away.
Rivas was reported missing from her neighborhood in early 2024. Posters of her face were plastered around town and shared on social media at the time.
Elie Naddaf, a corner store owner in Rivas’ neighborhood, told CNN he would often see Rivas come in with her friends after school for snacks.
He remembered her as a polite, respectful kid among the sometimes rowdy ones who would frequent his store.
“Always nice,” he said of Rivas.
Hints about the girl’s connection to Burke began to surface even before she was reported missing.
In January of 2024, Rivas appeared side by side with Burke in a livestream video on the social medial platform Twitch. In it, the pair joke and banter until about 3 a.m. before Burke laughingly proclaims, “Delete everything.”
A month later, a person concerned over Rivas’ well-being sent an email to an address bearing Burke’s stage name — d4vd — on his record company’s domain.
The writer referenced Rivas’ disappearance and said “There’s been talk” that Burke possibly had something to do with it.
If there was any truth to that, the person wrote, “please do the right thing and take her home. Her parents are very worried.”
CNN confirmed the authenticity of the email with the person who sent it. But that person asked not to be identified due to safety concerns.
Rivas returned home within days of the email being sent, an acquaintance of the family confirmed to CNN.
Around that same time, between January and March of 2024, the singer was photographed getting out of a black Tesla a few blocks from Rivas’ home. A local teen in Lake Elsinore later posted the photos on TikTok. CNN geolocated and chronolocated the photos to verify when and where they were taken.
A few months later, after having been reported missing again, Rivas was photographed backstage during a sold-out show the entertainer performed at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles in June.
Then, in August, came the message on Discord asking Burke when he was going to drop the song about the missing girl.
Another piece of the puzzle linking Burke to Rivas was found in Burke’s rented home after Rivas’ body was identified in September 2025 and the case began making national headlines.
Steve Fischer, a private investigator hired by the owner of the property, said he uncovered a digital camera inside the house with photos of both Rivas and Burke taken in late December of 2024 and early January of 2025. During that time, the entertainer posted other photos from the camera’s memory card to his X account, captioned “took these pics” along with a selfie of him wearing a camera of the same model.
After Rivas’ body was discovered and the case was widely publicized, her brother told NBCLA that the family was aware she knew Burke, and that she was on her way to see a movie with the singer when she disappeared. The family has since stopped speaking publicly about the case and did not respond to requests from CNN to be interviewed for this article.
Some of the intrigue surrounding Burke and his ties to Rivas comes from the singer himself. Though Burke comes across in interviews as a soft-spoken artist with a gentle demeanor, he has acknowledged having a darker alter ego he refers to as IT4MI, which he said was inspired by the Japanese word for “pain.”
“A part of that manga was an evil version of me,” he said in May to the music YouTube channel Mahogany.
“And he would commit the crimes that I would have to solve as the detective. … I’d be, like, solving murders that I’m committing myself.”
The song that went viral in 2022 and essentially launched his stardom was entitled “Romantic Homicide.” Among the lyrics was the line: “In the back of my mind I killed you and I didn’t even regret it.” The music video contains violent imagery of a young, dark-haired woman’s dead body and bloody knives.
In a later music video for the song “One More Dance,” Burke’s alterego drags his own body into the trunk of a car. Following the discovery of Rivas’ body in the trunk of Burke’s car, some fans began to connect the bloody aesthetic of his fantasy alterego, which can be common in the anime genre, to the real-life circumstances.
While authorities have kept quiet for months about the investigation, recent developments have signaled some movement in the probe.
In January, a young associate of Burke’s, who spent time with him at the house in the Hollywood Hills and was often photographed with him at events, was arrested at his mother’s house in Helena, Montana.
Lt. Adam Shanks with the Helena Police Department said detectives from Los Angeles had a material witness warrant for the young man.
“They came up here and scooped him up,” Shanks told CNN. He was then transported to Los Angeles, where he was booked into jail and released a day later on a $60,000 bond.
Then, last month, court documents in Texas became public, revealing a dispute over whether Burke’s family members could be forced to appear before the grand jury in Los Angeles. The filings also revealed a gruesome new detail about the case and provided some clarity about Burke’s status in the eyes of prosecutors.
The detail was that Rivas’ body was not only badly decomposed when it was found – it had been dismembered and separated into two bags before being placed in the trunk of the Tesla.
The clarity came in prosecutors describing Burke as a “target” of the investigation, titled, “The People of the State of California v. David Burke.”
The documents did not specify what role authorities suspect Burke may have played in the girl’s death, only that he was a “target” of the probe.
“It is alleged in this case that the Target may be involved in the death of 14-year-old victim Celeste Rivas Hernandez,” prosecutors wrote.