d4vd did it
All week long, I’ve been reading and watching stuff about the dismembered body in the car of the artist d4vd. (If you’re on TikTok, you’ve definitely heard his songs: “in the back of my mind, you died,” “I don’t care how long it takes,” etc.) It’s very creepy and nauseating, to be honest, but I have to talk about it.
1. Let’s be clear, there is no doubt that he did it: this thread (archived version via Thread Reader, in case something happens to the author’s account) contains all the convincing evidence, which later spread across videos and posts. He molested an underage girl (in correspondence with someone, Celeste — most likely her account, the author proved the connection through profile linking and identity correlation, and David was even following some of her Californian acquaintances, — she complains to her interlocutor that she only bled with David — apparently from her vagina and apparently because he tore her hymen), even getting her pregnant (which he openly admitted on his Discord server), he groomed her (according to the victim’s brother, he told her he was waiting for her to turn 18 to marry her), and wouldn’t let her visit her family; he had always been attracted to minors — several girls confirmed that while he was dating Celeste, he was flirting with them (he was 18).
A lot of circumstantial evidence has come to light: extremely strange reposts on TikTok about jealousy (which a normal person might also have, but NOT IN SUCH CONCENTRATION), their joint posts, stories, messages on the Discord server, the story that in 2024, when Celeste disappeared, he owed someone money in Lake Elsinore, her hometown; photos of him wearing his ex’s accessories, videos of him washing her shoes (I wouldn’t count this as significant evidence, but in the context of all of the above, it sounds creepy)...
In addition, people began to notice many eerie coincidences, which gave the impression that d4vd was directly hinting at it everywhere. For example, the music video for his track “Romantic Homicide” (the one in which he sings that he killed a girl “in the back of my mind” and “didn’t even regret it”) was released on September 7, 2022, the day Celeste turned 12. In the songs themselves, the artist sings about murder and suicidal thoughts, shoots videos of himself dragging someone’s body by the feet in a bloodstained shirt, and at some point, the aesthetics of his work begin to revolve around such themes (and in Discord, he admits that he likes gore aesthetics more than porn). As the culmination of his transformation, on the tour that began in the summer of 2025, David started bringing a silver coffin to every concert. A parallel with Destroy Lonely immediately comes to mind, and the thought arises: “If the girl hadn’t left DL back then, he might have done something similar.”
Finally, when Celeste’s murder started getting talked about a lot, David started deleting his reposts on TikTok in real time, turned off comments for people he didn’t follow, and teamed up with a moderator to clean up the Discord server. This was to make it clear that he (allegedly cooperating with the authorities) had absolutely nothing to hide (/s).
I still don’t understand whether he killed her in 2024 or 2025. She disappeared in April 2024, but posts on Reddit say that until early August 2025, Celeste’s acquaintances had heard something from her and seen posts on social media, and then something happened in August, after which d4vd seemed lost (which is not really proof). There is even a theory that she was still alive on August 24 of this year, because a girl who looked VERY similar to her was seen on the balcony at one of the concerts. It is claimed that after a year, the body would have stopped emitting any odor at all and it would not have been possible to identify the person from the remains. However, Grok convinces me otherwise in this dialogue. Once again, I realize that some things are best left to professional criminologists. But if the murder is “fresh,” I dread to imagine what Celeste went through while they searched for her for a year and four months.
2. None of this really matters — even the question of whether it was d4vd or someone else who “set him up” (which is a completely ridiculous excuse, considering that the owner should have reported the theft of his car to the police, and he certainly should have been concerned about the disappearance of his girlfriend) will be answered someday, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that Celeste Rivas Hernandez was murdered and dismembered.
I look at the photo: she is a young, beautiful, healthy girl — not even a woman yet, she is just about to become one. Surely she had plans for the future, dreams and ambitions. There are still many things she needed and wanted to learn.
Now she is gone, and she will never know. She won’t graduate from school, she won’t become who she could have been, she won’t get to know another life, other relationships, other places. Globally, life expectancy is declining, but there is no explanation as to why she, specifically, was not destined to live to the “golden” age of 15 (even though it’s not 16). Being cut up into bags is definitely not death from natural causes. Especially at 13 or 14 years old.
3. I am quite annoyed by how this event will affect (and, of course, is already affecting) hip-hop culture, alternative pop music, and R&B in general. It is widely known that hip-hop (with which R&B music has recently become more and more inextricably linked, in particular, d4vd has a feature with 21 Savage) grew out of street culture, so its “genetic code” is imbued with a gangster mentality with lines about murdering “opps”. Today, hip-hop is obviously not only and not so much “street” music as it is music for a wide audience: those who love rhythm and rhymes, as well as the sound. That’s not a bad thing — I love hip-hop not because of the “gangsta vibe”, but because I’ve been dancing to it since I was 8 years old and got used to this kind of music.
Hip-hop has become a global music genre, like everything else in the modern world. Today’s rappers are not drawn to the “street” lifestyle, but want to live richly and safely, and that’s okay too. Five years ago, when King Von was killed, I wrote that such “street fights” should not be normalized:
“For some reason, it is considered normal to settle scores with weapons and to support a lifestyle that is akin to ‘I shot a girl, I am a gangster, and my crew is with me.’ Naturally, this applies to everyone, not just rap culture, because it is still not normal. But to somehow support this lifestyle and constantly promote it...
Many people treated this death as something to be expected, as the very first ‘fighters’ passed away: Lil Peep, XXXTENTACION, Juice WRLD. And from the style of communication on the internet, it is clear that they will mourn and continue to promote this image and this lifestyle. But here’s what I think: we surely want to reduce the risk of death for many people, popular and unpopular, intelligent and ‘gangsters’. We have the opportunity to nip the problem in the bud, saving many lives. And that means, at the very least, to stop treating deaths from bullets (and deaths in general, but that’s a whole other conversation) as collateral damage.
I’m not telling people to mourn and write that this is one of the most shocking events of this fucking year. But don’t just say, ‘Yeah, he died, well, it happens, they got into a shootout,’ and forget about it as if that’s how it should be. No, it shouldn’t. Crimes like this shouldn’t become normal”
Since then, some progress has indeed been made — three years ago, for example, I could not have imagined that Quavo would raise the issue of gun violence in the US Congress. And yet, it is difficult for performers to live with cognitive dissonance in their heads.
This dissonance is meant to be resolved by artistic fiction — something invented specifically for art. Artists forget that this fiction can and even should be (given the peculiarities of culture) in their tracks. If all artists did what they sang about, and writers created what they wrote about in their books, we simply would not survive in the crazy world they invented, where nothing is stable and nothing and no one can be trusted.
But rappers are a special category: they believe they are obliged to adhere to the lifestyle they rap about in their tracks. The worst accusation for them is “you got some cap in your rap.” Everyone considers it their duty to laugh at the compilation of Lil Tecca comments on Genius — well, yes, it would be worth visiting places outside the US during his 23 years of life. But no one has died at Tecca’s hands, and he himself is alive and has not been charged with anything. So it’s better to lie 100 times in a track than to rap about a crime you’ve committed. Otherwise, hip-hop will, at the very least, return to the ghetto, becoming music for marginalized segments of the population, and the performers themselves will be fighting each other to the point that the genre will simply degenerate because there will be no one left to create music.
4. What infuriates me even more is that prosecutors in court will now make it a rule to refer to tracks with lyrics about crimes as circumstantial evidence of the crimes themselves. When this was done in the YSL trial, it seemed like a blatant substitution of evidence with quasi-evidence — as if the prosecutor deliberately ignored the traditions established in hip-hop culture (which would have provided important context and undermined the argument).
Today, any artist can be prosecuted for a crime they may not even have committed, simply by referring to the RICO case in YSL and the body found in d4vd’s car. Statistics don’t necessarily have to be three: two is enough. Rap will degenerate again — all authors will be behind bars for a “suspicious” line in a song.
But all this is a consequence of the fact that 13-year-old Celeste Rivas was brutally murdered, dismembered, and found in pieces in David Burke’s car. I urge you to remember that this is the most terrible thing in the whole story.
Celeste’s funeral will take place on October 5 (the media reports that it will be on October 4; however, this may be due to the time difference — California is 9 hours behind the Netherlands (I have a Dutch proxy in my browser), and the funeral will probably take place closer to the evening). If you care about the story of her murder, I kindly ask you to help her family through GoFundMe — for some unknown reason, the family renamed the fundraiser from “Help Lay Celeste Rivas Hernandez to Rest” to “Help Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s family,” but her relatives and friends still need money for the funeral. And if you decide to donate, please throw in a penny for me too (I am located in Russia and do not have a foreign currency account) — it doesn’t take much: it won’t hurt you, but you will know that you have made a contribution that is within your means. If empathy speaks in you, if thanks to you the crime and the victim have become visible, then the next criminal will understand that a possible act will cost him dearly.
d4vd must be in prison.
The murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez must be investigated.
My thoughts, my heart, and my conscience are with Celeste’s family and friends.
Rest easy, babygirl, and may the earth be light on you.
