Prosecutors kicked off a much-anticipated hearing in D4vd’s murder case on Tuesday (July 21) with photos of severed body parts belonging to 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez.
The 21-year-old “Romantic Homicide” singer (David Anthony Burke) was charged in April with stabbing Rivas to death and dismembering the body after she threatened to derail his music career by exposing their illegal sexual relationship. Now, he’s facing a week-long preliminary hearing for a judge to determine if there’s sufficient evidence to sustain counts of first-degree murder, child sexual abuse and mutilating a body.
According to Rolling Stone, prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office began the hearing Tuesday by showing photos of Rivas’ torso in one black plastic bag and her arms and legs in another. Police discovered these body parts in September in the front trunk of an impounded Tesla registered to D4vd.
An LAPD detective who was on the scene at a Hollywood tow lot testified that he was not able to discern any of Rivas’ facial features. “There was quite a bit of decomposition,” explained Det. Joshua Byers, per Rolling Stone. “The skin slippage made it unrecognizable.” Rivas’ family members were in the courtroom, as was D4vd.
Prosecutors claim D4vd met Rivas when she was 11 years old, and that they began having a sexual relationship when she was 13 and the singer was 18. He allegedly sent an Uber to bring her to his house in Los Angeles on April 23, 2025, after they had argued and she threatened to go public with their illegal relationship. Prosecutors say D4vd stabbed Rivas that night out of fear she would “devastate his musical career.” His debut album Withered dropped two days later.
According to prosecutors, D4vd later bought two chainsaws online and used them to dismember Rivas’ body in an inflatable pool in his garage. The body parts were found in D4vd’s car the following September, when D4vd was on the road for his Withered world tour.
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D4vd has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His attorneys have said they will “vigorously defend” him in court. “Let us be clear,” said the singer’s defense lawyers in a statement following his April arrest, “the actual evidence in this case will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivas Hernandez and he was not the cause of her death.”
The preliminary hearing that began Tuesday and will continue Wednesday (July 22) is the first step in D4vd’s criminal case. A judge is tasked with testing the prosecution’s evidence and determining whether there’s probable cause to believe he could be guilty. This is a lower burden than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard for conviction at a jury trial.
During a news conference on Tuesday, District Attorney Nathan Hochman said his team will present more than 10 witnesses during the hearing, including police officers and coroners, and D4vd’s lawyers will get a chance to cross-examine their testimony. Hochman said this is just a subset of the evidence prosecutors plan to put on at an eventual jury trial, which will be scheduled for a later date if the judge rules in their favor and sustains the case.
“At the end of the presentation of all this evidence, the question will be will D4vd be held to answer on the three felony charges,” said Hochman. “We believe we will more than accomplish the evidentiary burden of probable cause at this point.”
D4vd’s murder charge includes a “special circumstances” enhancement, which makes the maximum sentence death or life in prison without parole. Hochman’s office has not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty.
