Singer D4vd had a series of sexually explicit photos on his cell phone of a 14-year-old girl whose dismembered remains were found last year in the trunk of his Tesla at a Hollywood tow yard, with some images depicting him and the teen engaged in sexual activity, a detective testified Friday.
Testifying on the fourth day of a hearing to determine if there is sufficient evidence for the 21-year-old singer to stand trial on murder and other charges, Los Angeles Police Department Robbery-Homicide Detective Corey Farell described the images one-by-one as they were shown to him on the stand by a prosecutor. The photos were not displayed openly in court.
Farell described the photos as depicting D4vd — whose real name is David Anthony Burke — and Celeste Rivas Hernandez kissing in bed, engaging in sexual intercourse and performing oral sex acts. There were also photos of the teen’s genitalia, Farell said.
Burke was charged April 20 with capital murder in the teen’s death, with prosecutors contending he killed her because the teen was threatening to go public with details of their sexual relationship, potentially threatening his burgeoning music career.
The murder charge includes the special circumstance allegations of lying in wait, murder for financial gain and killing a witness in a criminal investigation. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is expected to decide later whether to seek the death penalty against Burke, who remains jailed without bail.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman has said the lying-in-wait allegation stems from D4vd’s invitation to the teen to come to his Hollywood Hills home on April 23, 2025, while the financial gain allegation stems from the singer’s effort to maintain his lucrative music career, which was being threatened by his alleged sexual relationship with the underage girl, Hochman said.
The teen was considered the key witness in that investigation, leading to the allegation of murdering a witness, the district attorney said.
Burke is also charged with one count each of continuous sexual abuse of a child under age 14 and mutilation of human remains.
He has pleaded not guilty through his attorneys, who have maintained his innocence.
The victim’s parents, who have been attending much of the hearing in downtown Los Angeles, left the courtroom Friday afternoon as Farell described the explicit photos. They also were not in the courtroom Friday morning, when a deputy county medical examiner was on the stand and more graphic photos of their daughter’s remains were displayed in court.
Dr. Grant Ho testified that Celeste had likely been dead for weeks — possibly months — before her dismembered remains were found last September. Ho noted that it was “extremely difficult” to tell exactly how long the girl had been dead before her body was discovered, since it was “severely decomposed.”
The teen’s body was found last Sept. 8 — just days after what would have been her 15th birthday, according to the prosecution’s court filing, which noted that the vehicle had been towed three days earlier while parked about 400 feet from his Hollywood Hills home.
“Surveillance video and other evidence confirm defendant was the last person to drive the vehicle on July 29, 2025, before he left Los Angeles on a concert tour,” according to a court filing by the prosecution.
Ho told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo there was a very distinct smell from the girl’s remains that was “noticeable even before you reached the autopsy room.”
Under questioning by Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman, Ho said the girl could have “potentially” been dead for about five months and that she had two penetrating wounds — one to the right side of her abdomen and the other to the left side of her chest — that were life-threatening and would have taken “minutes” to bleed out. He said he concluded those injuries caused the girl’s death.
“I’m willing to say that she’s been dead for weeks,” Ho said under questioning by one of Burke’s attorneys, Marilyn Bednarski.
Ho said a power saw had “potentially” been used to dismember the girl’s arms and legs. He noted that her left pinky finger and left ring finger had also been removed, saying it was consistent with a sharp instrument such as a knife or saw being used to cut them off.
The deputy medical examiner said he found “partial skeletonization” to the girl’s face and that her left eye was “absent.” He said he couldn’t tell if the missing eye resulted from the decomposition.
The prosecution contended in an April court filing that Burke “purchased tools to carry out his plot to dismember and dispose of the victim’s body,” including ordering a shovel, two chain saws, a body bag, heavy-duty laundry bags and a blue inflatable pool to be delivered to his home under a fake name.
“Moreover, defendant took horrifying measures to destroy and discard the victim’s body. After placing her body into the blue inflatable pool to prevent her blood from spilling onto his garage floor, defendant used a chain saw and perhaps other tools to cut off her limbs. Small blue plastic fragments were found embedded in the victim’s remains, which were collected by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Department,” according to the prosecution’s filing earlier this year.
LAPD detectives served a search warrant last Sept. 16 at Burke’s home and found “evidence consistent with the dismemberment of the victim’s body in the inflatable pool, which contained multiple linear cuts,” according to the prosecution’s filing.
The filing alleges that Burke “amputated her left ring and pinky fingers because her ring finger contained a tattoo of his name,” and those fingers were not found in the Tesla.
The filing alleges that several biological samples, which tested positive for blood, were collected within the garage area. DNA analysis determined that various samples matched the victim’s unique genetic profile.
According to the prosecution’s brief, Burke and the girl met in January 2022 when she was 11 years old and they began a “sexual relationship” in November 2023 when she was 13 and he was 18, and “text exchanges between the victim and defendant contain references to sex, pregnancy, abortion and use of the Plan B emergency contraceptive.”
Prosecutors said the pair “broke up” in November 2024 but continued to communicate and that “text messages suggest they also continued to have sexual relations.”
The prosecution alleges in the filing that the girl likely died April 23, 2025, and that the two had “engaged in a lengthy argument described in detail in their text messages” a night earlier that “reveal the victim’s jealousy over defendant’s relationships with other women, as defendant led her to believe they had a future together.”
The teen “became extremely upset and threatened to disclose damaging information about her relationship with the defendant to end his career and destroy his life,” according to the filing, which noted that his first studio album was set to be released a few days later.
Burke allegedly sent an Uber to bring the girl from her Lake Elsinore home to his residence and then sent text messages to her inquiring where she was after the Uber dropped her off, the prosecution alleges.
The prosecution contends in the brief that it was “part of defendant’s premeditated plan to cover up the murder, as she was already dead by this time.”
“Knowing he had to silence the victim before she ruined his music career as she had threatened, very soon after her arrival at his home, defendant stabbed the victim to death multiple times and stood by while she bled out. At no time did he call law enforcement or 911 or take her to an emergency room to save her life. Despite knowing she was dead and her family was trying to find her, the evidence will show defendant lied and claimed he didn’t know where she was,” according to the filing.
In testimony earlier this week, Los Angeles Police Detective Joshua Byers said Burke allegedly used an alias to buy two cadaver bags, heavy-duty laundry bags and an inflatable pool.
LAPD criminalist Lisa LaHendro testified Thursday that blue fragments recovered by the county medical examiner’s office from the teen matched up with portions missing from the inflatable pool the prosecution alleges he used to dismember her body.
The pool was discovered during a search last Sept. 17 in the garage of Burke’s rented Hollywood Hills home, with another criminalist, Lauren Wallace, testifying Wednesday that the pool had multiple cuts, appeared to have a “fresh, almost laundry-like scent” and had a white dryer sheet rolled up inside of it.
Another LAPD criminalist, Samantha Tosch, testified that DNA collected from apparent blood stains on evidence including a rowing machine, a green tarp and a Tesla charger plug discovered in the home’s garage were one septillion times — meaning one followed by 24 zeroes — more likely to occur if the DNA was from the teen than an unknown individual.
Tosch noted that Burke was included as a possible contributor involving DNA test results on a swab from the outside of a trash bag that was also found in the garage and contained a mixture of DNA from four people. Another trash bag contained wipes with brown stains that were consistent with the teen’s profile but not Burke’s, she said.
D4vd was arrested April 16 by LAPD officers.
His attorneys issued a statement at the time denying the singer killed the teenager.
“Let us be clear, 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,” Bednarski and fellow defense attorneys Blair Berk and Regina Peter said. “We will vigorously defend David’s innocence.”