By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES, April 29 (Reuters) – Los Angeles County prosecutors filed a court brief on Wednesday detailing “horrifying” steps they said indie pop musician D4vd took to dismember and conceal the body of a teenage girlfriend after allegedly stabbing her to death last April.
According to the document, outlining evidence prosecutors plan to present in their murder case, the singer-songwriter placed the victim’s corpse in a blue inflatable pool “to prevent blood from spilling onto his garage floor,” then removed her limbs with a chain saw “and perhaps other tools.”
The brief said that D4vd (pronounced “David”), 21, whose legal name is David Burke, had purchased the pool, two chain saws, a shovel, a cadaver bag and other materials online under a fictitious name and had them delivered to his Hollywood Hills home after the killing.
The badly decomposed torso and head of Celeste Rivas Hernandez, 14, were discovered in September inside a cadaver bag stuffed in the trunk of a Tesla registered to Burke, according to police, prosecutors and medical examiners. Underneath was a plastic garbage bag containing the victim’s limbs, they said.
Two fingers on the girl’s left hand, one of them tattooed with Burke’s name, had been amputated but were not recovered, prosecutors said.
According to the eight-page court filing, Burke was the last person to drive the vehicle on July 29, 2025, before he left it abandoned near his home and departed on a concert tour. Weeks later, the car was towed to an impoundment lot where workers reported the odor of decay and alerted authorities.
Wednesday’s court brief, a copy of which was posted online by CBS News, also offered prosecutors’ first mention of a motive in the killing. They said Burke was out to silence the girl because she had grown jealous of him and threatened to ruin his burgeoning music career by going public with damaging information about their relationship.
Burke’s first studio album was due for release that month and he had secured highly profitable product endorsements at the time, the district attorney’s office said.
According to prosecutors, the pair had a sexual relationship when the girl was as young as 11, and authorities recovered text messages with references to sex, pregnancy, abortion and Plan B emergency contraception, as well as sexually explicit photos.
On April 23, 2025, the day after they quarreled over her threats to expose him, according to the court brief, Burke sent for her in an Uber ride, then “stabbed the victim to death” after she arrived.
The document then outlines “horrifying measures” Burke allegedly took to “destroy and discard the victim’s body.” It says a search of his garage in September found evidence of dismemberment, including blood samples and remnants of an inflatable pool with “multiple linear cuts.”
Burke gained fame in 2022 after songs he recorded on his phone for his Fortnite-brand gaming videos went viral on TikTok, with the hit single “Romantic Homicide” helping him sign a deal with Interscope Records. He performed at the Coachella music festival in 2025.
“We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivas Hernandez, nor was he the cause of her death,” defense attorney Blair Berk said during his April 20 arraignment, where he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and other charges.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los AngelesEditing by Shri Navaratnam)
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