{"id":11186,"date":"2026-07-25T20:13:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T20:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/d4vd-murder-hearing-shows-dismembered-celeste-rivas-hernandez-photos\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T20:13:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T20:13:03","slug":"d4vd-murder-hearing-shows-dismembered-celeste-rivas-hernandez-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/d4vd-murder-hearing-shows-dismembered-celeste-rivas-hernandez-photos\/","title":{"rendered":"D4vd Murder Hearing Shows Dismembered Celeste Rivas Hernandez Photos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tProsecutors kicked off a much-anticipated hearing in D4vd\u2019s murder case on Tuesday (July 21) with photos of severed body parts belonging to 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 21-year-old \u201cRomantic Homicide\u201d 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\u2019s facing a week-long preliminary hearing for a judge to determine if there\u2019s sufficient evidence to sustain counts of first-degree murder, child sexual abuse and mutilating a body.<\/p>\n

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\n\tAccording to Rolling Stone<\/a><\/em>, prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney\u2019s Office began the hearing Tuesday by showing photos of Rivas\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn LAPD detective who was on the scene at a Hollywood tow lot testified that he was not able to discern any of Rivas\u2019 facial features. \u201cThere was quite a bit of decomposition,\u201d explained Det. Joshua Byers, per Rolling Stone<\/em>. \u201cThe skin slippage made it unrecognizable.\u201d Rivas\u2019 family members were in the courtroom, as was D4vd.<\/p>\n

\n\tProsecutors 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 \u201cdevastate his musical career.\u201d His debut album Withered <\/em>dropped two days later.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to prosecutors, D4vd later bought two chainsaws online and used them to dismember Rivas\u2019 body in an inflatable pool in his garage. The body parts were found in D4vd\u2019s car the following September, when D4vd was on the road for his Withered<\/em> world tour.<\/p>\n

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\n\tD4vd has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His attorneys have said they will \u201cvigorously defend\u201d him in court. \u201cLet us be clear,\u201d said the singer\u2019s defense lawyers in a statement following his April arrest, \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe preliminary hearing that began Tuesday and will continue Wednesday (July 22) is the first step in D4vd\u2019s criminal case. A judge is tasked with testing the prosecution\u2019s evidence and determining whether there\u2019s probable cause to believe he could be guilty. This is a lower burden than \u201cbeyond a reasonable doubt,\u201d the standard for conviction at a jury trial.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring a news conference on Tuesday, District Attorney Nathan Hochman <\/strong>said his team will present more than 10 witnesses during the hearing, including police officers and coroners, and D4vd\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt the end of the presentation of all this evidence, the question will be will D4vd be held to answer on the three felony charges,\u201d said Hochman. \u201cWe believe we will more than accomplish the evidentiary burden of probable cause at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tD4vd\u2019s murder charge includes a \u201cspecial circumstances\u201d enhancement, which makes the maximum sentence death or life in prison without parole. Hochman\u2019s office has not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty.<\/p>\n


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Prosecutors kicked off a much-anticipated hearing in D4vd\u2019s murder case on Tuesday (July 21) with photos of severed body parts belonging to 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. The 21-year-old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7512,7511,8266,590,7785,2528,390,7513,4031],"class_list":["post-11186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-celeste","tag-d4vd","tag-dismembered","tag-hearing","tag-hernandez","tag-murder","tag-photos","tag-rivas","tag-shows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}