LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storySafiyya was sound asleep at her parents’ apartment when the unthinkable happened. It was almost midnight on a Monday last September, and her phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. She got out of bed and went over to her computer, her body pulsing with adrenaline. Messages were pouring in on the Discord server she moderated. She began to panic.
“What the fuck is happening,” one Discord user wrote in the general chat. “Yall i cant go to sleep now,” wrote another. “Dude I have school tmr,” someone else chimed in. “Daddy d4vd may be getting canceled,” a separate user wrote.
“D4vd slimed someone,” another user said—slang for murdered.
The Discord server known as “d4vd’s closet,” for fans of the Soundcloud-native singer-songwriter D4vd, was processing horrific news in real time. Hours earlier, on the afternoon of September 8, a decomposing body had been discovered in the front trunk of a black Tesla in a Los Angeles tow yard. It was registered, in Texas, to then-20-year-old David Anthony Burke, the real name of D4vd.
Safiyya, who is 24 and lives in Canada, was near speechless. (She, like many sources in this piece, asked to be identified by either a username, pseudonym, or first name, out of fear of harassment.) “Bro wtf,” she typed into the Discord general chat, her hands shaking. “Just wtfff.” It wasn’t just the gruesome headlines that rattled her. This real-life homicide eerily paralleled the fictional ones depicted in D4vd’s song lyrics and music videos. There was, most obviously, his 2022 breakout hit, “Romantic Homicide,” a moody electronic ballad that Safiyya had first discovered, like so many others, as a viral earworm on TikTok. In the music video, D4vd—dressed as “Itami,” his murderous, blindfolded alter ego—stands in front of a woman’s lifeless, blood-splattered body; a knife drops from his hand.
Then there was the 2025 music video for “One More Dance,” which evokes a 1990s horror movie à la The Blair Witch Project. The opening scene shows Itami, again played by D4vd, dragging his own body across the ground, dumping it in front of a car, and watching as friends stuff it in the trunk. The video culminates with his friends burying him alive in an open grave. Now D4vd’s fans wondered in the Discord server: Was D4vd’s art imitating his life, or was it the other way around?
“D4vd didn’t kill someone itami did,” one user wrote. “He was trying to tell us all along,” wrote another who posted an image of a particularly catchy lyric from “Romantic Homicide”:
To get around copyright strikes on YouTube, D4vd used a mobile app called Bandlab and royalty-free beats to create viral earworms.Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty ImagesSafiyya joined D4vd’s Discord more than two years earlier. She liked the song “Romantic Homicide,” but more importantly, her crush, whom she’d met while playing a first-person shooter game called Valorant, claimed to be a friend of D4vd’s. When she sent her first message, a simple “ello” in May 2023, she found that others were eager to engage. The server was one giant, constantly active group chat, but with strangers from all over the world. It felt chaotic, unwieldy. Shitposting—a language Safiyya was well versed in from spending years in gaming-related Discord servers—was pervasive.
Things didn’t work out with her crush, but Safiyya liked staying up late after work and chatting with the thousands of people in D4vd’s Discord. She didn’t know much about anyone beyond their avatars and usernames, and it didn’t matter—the conversation almost always circled back to what they all had in common: D4vd’s music. Members debated their favorite tracks (Safiyya’s was “Sleep Well,” a lo-fi R&B love song), compared merch, and shared tour dates they planned to attend.
Safiyya was so active in the chat that, after just a few months, a moderator asked if she’d like to join their ranks. The unpaid role came with a lot of pressure. Seven mods were expected to post at least 500 messages a week. It was a way to encourage engagement, Safiyya says. All the time she put into the Discord server was worth it: She wasn’t just a part of D4vd’s community, she was a curator of it.
In the early hours of September 9, though, Safiyya started to resent her role as moderator. She didn’t like being one of the adults in the room, tasked with wrangling an out-of-control conversation. There was confusion, pandemonium, and, as one might expect from extremely online Zoomers posting on Discord, there were jokes—many in exceptionally poor taste. Some speculated that D4vd had been framed, that the news was fake, or that this was all promo for the forthcoming album D4vd had been teasing incessantly on social media.
As anxious as Safiyya felt, discussing a murder case in real time—one involving a suspect that everyone had at least a parasocial relationship with—was also kind of thrilling. Safiyya was close enough to D4vd that they had each other’s cell phone numbers. He’d even FaceTimed her once to ask for help deleting a Twitch livestream. (Safiyya was on another call and missed it.) She liked D4vd, of course, and felt protective of his career.
Initially, Safiyya thought there was no way D4vd could’ve been involved. He’d just played a show in Chicago, and she figured someone must have borrowed or stolen his car while he was out of town. To her, it seemed like an injustice that this would happen just as D4vd was about to become a world-famous superstar: He was two weeks away from playing the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, before headlining a European tour the following month, capping off a dizzying year in which he also made his Coachella debut. Guilty or not, Safiyya knew the damage had been done.
D4vd performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2025.Photograph: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images“Tour finna get cancel 💔💔” Safiyya posted in the general chat of the Discord server. A short while later, in all caps, her frustration boiled over: “This boi got collab left and right just for this shit to happen.”
Soon, the grave reality of the situation began to sink in. “We’re finna end up in a documentary,” one user posted, around 2:15 am. By 7 am, the speculation in D4vd’s Discord server had become so rampant that moderators disabled new posts. Safiyya was scared, feeling as if she’d suddenly been thrust into a criminal investigation.
Over the next several days, D4vd’s remaining tour dates would get canceled, just as Safiyya had predicted; so would the deluxe version of his first studio album, initially slated for release on September 19. His just-launched fashion campaign with Hollister and Crocs would get canned; and the Grammy-winning singer Kali Uchis would pull her duet with D4vd from streaming platforms. It seemed to many of D4vd’s former fans that his arrest for murder would be imminent too.
When it wasn’t, they took matters into their own hands. Overwhelmed by a sense of urgency, onetime D4vd stans began combing through his Discord server, suspecting it contained information so incriminating that it was only a matter of time before it got wiped. In the end, even Safiyya couldn’t have imagined how quickly many of her peers turned against their favorite musician, splintering and spiraling into a feverish—and often personal—quest for justice.
Like most people his age, David Burke grew up on the internet and learned from a young age how to weaponize it. He was born in 2005, the same year YouTube launched, and has been posting videos to the platform since at least the age of 13—around the same time he moved with his devout Christian family from Queens, New York, to a middle-class suburb of Houston. Some of his earliest uploads are screen recordings of his plays on Fortnite, a battle-royale-style video game he was obsessed with. They offered him the attention and social interaction he seemed to be otherwise lacking.
“He was grinding. He was posting every day, playing every day, he was trying his hardest to get somewhere,” says a 21-year-old New York–based gamer who goes by the username Sacred WTF. “Bro, I would just wake up sometimes and it would just be multiple posts from him. He was just trying to pop off, just get one good video.”
By 2021, D4vd was 16 and already building a brand as a socially awkward outcast who spent nearly all of his time online. (It helped that he was homeschooled.) Sometimes, it paid off: When he started catering to the YouTube algorithm by adding popular songs to his Fortnite videos, they racked up hundreds of thousands of views and generated “a lot of money” in ad revenue, he’d later tell musician Benny Blanco in an interview. But those massive views also brought copyright strikes—warnings from YouTube, prompted by record labels, to remove the songs or risk getting booted from the platform. That’s when, according to the now mythic origin story that D4vd has relayed in the press, his mom had a life-altering suggestion: Why didn’t her son make his own damn music?
Using his iPhone, a pair of earbuds, and a mobile app called Bandlab, D4vd—he adopted the moniker around this time, in part for search engine optimization—huddled in his sister’s closet and recorded himself freestyling over a royalty-free piano beat he found on YouTube. He uploaded the track, called “Run Away,” to Soundcloud in December 2021 and tagged it with keywords that helped it go viral: #emo #chill #lowfi #slowedandreverb #blowthisup #foryoupage.
But it wasn’t until July 2022, when he self-released the brooding ballad “Romantic Homicide,” that the then-17-year-old really blew up. Two months later, D4vd signed a deal with Interscope Records’ Darkroom imprint. The comparisons to Billie Eilish, who also scored a deal with Darkroom as a teenager after uploading tracks to Soundcloud, were immediate. In magazine profiles, D4vd was heralded as a new kind of wunderkind: a sheltered gamer who accidentally became a pop star, seemingly overnight. GQ dubbed him a “mouthpiece for Gen-Z heartache.” NME declared he was a “multi-genre visionary.” And Billboard christened D4vd “one of alternative music’s most promising new artists.”
“When I found him, it was like, ‘Wow, he made this in his closet on headphones, on Bandlab. That’s so cool. I could do that, too,’” says Ykare, a popular TikTokker who used to dream about collaborating with D4vd. “That was his whole thing. That was his claim to fame. I think that’s really what brought in a lot of younger audiences.”
Before Ykare found his niche—dressing as a Teletubby and singing in the shower—he was inspired by D4vd’s humble beginnings. “People looked up to him,” Ykare says, because of D4vd’s explosive breakout from a “homemade, ‘I made this in my bedroom’ niche. That’s where D4vd lived, and he kind of was the most successful to do that.”
D4vd communicated with his super-young fans through his Discord. His server was created by a fan named Moji around the time he signed his record deal. Though not officially affiliated with Darkroom, the Discord had a clear benefit to the label: It was a way to promote releases, tour dates, and merchandise directly to superfans. Moderators, which were mostly other fans but also included at least one member of D4vd’s management team, Mogul Vision, and occasionally D4vd himself, shared links to new content and encouraged members to subscribe to D4vd’s email list for presale ticket codes. (Neither Mogul Vision, Darkroom, Interscope Geffen A&M Records, nor its parent company, Universal Music Group, responded to a request for comment.) The tactics also cemented D4vd’s perceived authenticity as a chronically online teenager without much media training.
In February 2023, three months before he dropped his debut EP and kicked off his first European tour, D4vd popped into the Discord with an announcement: He’d “officially named the blindfold character” he’d portrayed in the video for “Romantic Homicide.” His name was Itami, the Japanese word for pain, D4vd explained, and he was only the first character of many to come in his own cinematic universe, which he called the “d4vdverse.” A few days later, he posted about Itami on X, telling fans to “feel free to leave conspiracy theories.” In the YouTube caption for a music video featuring the character, D4vd took the concept a step further, instructing his fans to look for Easter eggs.
“He wears a blindfold for the sole purpose of not being held accountable for the pain he causes,” reads the caption. “He’s been planted in all of my music videos but it’s not clear what his motive is … You will soon find out.”
D4vd performed his hit song “Romantic Homicide” on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2023.Photograph: Randy Holmes/Getty ImagesWhen Sarah, who is 30 and works in veterinary medicine in Oregon, first heard about the body uncovered from D4vd’s car, she had the same thought as Safiyya: D4vd must have been framed. Sarah had joined the musician’s Discord server after hearing “Romantic Homicide” on TikTok and loving its slow-building melody and evocative lyrics. But she’d always interpreted them as metaphorical: “Like, you’re dead emotionally to me, you know?”
Then she came across a Reddit post and began to fear that D4vd’s lyrics were more literal. The post was written by a since-deleted user who worried, in the days before the human remains in D4vd’s Tesla had been identified, that they already knew who the victim was. “A close friends [sic] little sister from the [Inland Empire] ran away last year and this is who she was with,” the message, which has also since been deleted, reads in part. “I’m terrified that’s who is in the car- nobody has heard from her in months. I won’t release names as shes [sic] still a minor but she was from Lake Elsinore.”
On September 18, when the Los Angeles Police Department publicly released the name of the victim, Sarah felt sick to her stomach. It was 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. As the Reddit post had suggested, she was from Lake Elsinore, a working-class city about 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles. She had indeed been reported missing by her family. In photos of Rivas Hernandez splashed across the news, she had big brown eyes, a cleft chin, and middle-parted black ringlets that fell past her shoulders. She wore a gold cross around her neck and dressed like the middle schooler she was, in jeans, sneakers, and zip-up hoodies from the Gap.
The dead body of Celeste Rivas Hernandez was found in the trunk of a Tesla owned by D4vd.Photograph: Getty ImagesFor Sarah, who says she was groomed as a teenager by an adult in a gaming chat room, it was not difficult to imagine that Rivas Hernandez may have met D4vd online, maybe even in a Discord server. Sarah remembers thinking: “I’ve been Celeste. I’ve been in her shoes.”
It wasn’t the first time that Sarah—who enjoyed sleuthing and had grown up watching the 2010s reality show Catfish, about people using fake online identities—had empathized with a young, female murder victim. In the summer of 2021, she followed the online investigation into the disappearance of 22-year-old Gabby Petito. After weeks of searching, and a near-endless stream of viral YouTube and TikTok videos, Petito’s remains were found in a national forest in Wyoming. Soon after, her fiancé killed himself, leaving behind a notebook in which he confessed to her murder. Sarah was less than three years older than Petito at the time, and she’d also been in an abusive relationship. “I thought that I would end up like her,” Sarah says.
Fueled by her anger about Rivas Hernandez’s murder and her own experiences with men, Sarah, like legions of others who once streamed “Romantic Homicide” on repeat, turned on D4vd. Sarah blocked his music on Spotify and joined newly created Discord servers with names like “The David Case” and “David Leaks,” where former fans were now scouring the artist’s digital footprint for traces of Rivas Hernandez. True-crime buffs, many of whom had never previously heard of D4vd but were now scandalized by his morbid lyrics, became engrossed with the murder mystery too.
They swarmed r/d4vd, a subreddit where fans once posted interpretations of song lyrics and D4vd’s social media posts. Only now, the speculation was unified and turbo-charged by a shared theory: That D4vd groomed Rivas Hernandez online, engaged in a sexual relationship with her, and housed her when she ran away from home at just 13 years old.
Rivas Hernandez was reported missing to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office at least twice in 2024: once, on Valentine’s Day, and again in April, following a brief return home. 911 call logs obtained by WIRED suggest Rivas Hernandez’s home life may have been tumultuous. Roughly three weeks after her second disappearance, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office received a call reporting a suspicious circumstance at her family’s home, which sits on the same block as a liquor store and an auto repair shop. On Christmas Eve, the sheriff’s office fielded a call reporting an alleged battery that had just occurred at her home; a report was not taken, and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office declined to offer specifics. A lawyer representing Rivas Hernandez’s parents did not respond to a request for comment.
The mystery surrounding Rivas Hernandez’s death made news globally. “It really hits on a lot of issues, like the exploitation and abuse of minors in Hollywood specifically and the system and how it protects or fails to protect minors,” says Amanda, a 30-year-old speech-language pathologist who grew up close to D4vd’s Texas hometown and became intrigued by the case after hearing about it on TikTok. “She was a minor, she was vulnerable, a runaway in the streets of Hollywood, you know? Like, could you be more vulnerable?”
In fast-growing subreddits like r/d4vd2, r/CelesteRivasHernandez, r/JusticeforCeleste, and r/d4vdiots, Rivas Hernandez became a martyr nearly overnight. There were illustrations of her as a saint and avatars of her face, taken from missing person’s flyers her family once posted on Facebook. Sleuths saw her everywhere: in screenshots of Instagram stories, where a dainty hand showed off what appeared to be an engagement ring and an index finger tattoo that read “Shhh” (D4vd, they alleged, has a matching one); on Twitch, where a sassy girl in a hoodie and oversized glasses appeared to taunt and embarrass D4vd during a livestream, even accusing him of “raping kids”; and in D4vd’s own music videos, which frequently featured actors who shared a resemblance to Rivas Hernandez, with olive skin and curly dark hair.
When sleuths noticed that Aysia Collins, a 23-year-old model and actor who played D4vd’s love interest in the video for “Sleep Well,” had also appeared in his Instagram photos and Twitch streams, they flooded her social media pages with accusations relating to Rivas Hernandez. Anyone and everyone who had been photographed regularly alongside D4vd, including the video game streamer Neo Langston—better known by his handle, NeoTheAsian—became fair game to online interrogators.
On Reddit and TikTok, nearly every aspect of the case was debated endlessly, including the length of time Rivas Hernandez’s remains had been in the Tesla and the exact date she died. There were even more grisly questions: Had her body been dismembered or merely decomposed? (It would be another several months until the LA County District Attorney confirmed both were true.) Meanwhile, conspiracies proliferated about D4vd having hired doppelgängers as a way to hide his alleged relationship with an underage runaway.
These theories may have seemed outlandish if D4vd hadn’t explicitly trained his fans, through his introduction of Itami and the so-called d4vdverse, to analyze his music for hidden meanings. Symbolism, fantasy, and mythology—much of it inspired by Japanese anime and world-building video games like Fortnite—were so central to D4vd’s brand that one of his moderators even created a channel in his Discord server to encourage conjecture. The channel was described as a place “to discuss your theories and whatever you think the lore is going to be in the future projects.”
It was a chilly September afternoon, but Ghost felt flush. Glued to the computer in his bedroom in New Jersey, he’d just stumbled upon what he considered a bombshell piece of evidence. Ghost had joined D4vd’s Discord server in 2022, not long after it was created; he and D4vd were in the same Fortnite-related Discord servers previously, Ghost says, and when he found out that D4vd was a musician, he was excited to be among the first to know about new releases. But within a couple of years, Ghost, along with many other early fans, had grown impatient with the singer, whom they felt was spending too much time on TikTok and not enough in the studio.
In one TikTok from early 2024, D4vd professed to be consumed with a “Hello Kitty girl” he’d met three years earlier. In another, posted later that year, just before D4vd acquired nearly half a dozen new facial piercings, he trolled his fans by captioning a video of himself driving a Tesla and listening to new music from Tyler, the Creator: “im too busy playing fortnite to finish my album 😭” When D4vd’s first studio album, Withered, finally dropped in April 2025, Ghost was thrilled.
Photo-illustration: Elizabeth Renstrom; Getty ImagesBut his feelings changed completely five months later, when he heard about Rivas Hernandez’s murder from a video that autoplayed on his YouTube feed. “It’s like a switch was flipped,” he says. Imagining that Rivas Hernandez must have been the “Hello kitty girl,” Ghost surged with anger and a desire for vengeance. He could feel himself slipping into detective mode; it was, as his online alias might suggest, one that he particularly enjoyed.
Ghost, despite being just 16 years old, is a self-described ethical hacker who taught himself how to use open source intelligence. It all started when one of his friends in middle school was “blackmailed by a catfish account on Instagram” that threatened to release embarrassing photos. Ghost considered himself computer-savvy and wanted to help. When he verified the IP address and identity of the catfisher, Ghost says, he realized, “Hey, I’m actually really good at this.”
But even Ghost was startled at how seemingly easy it was to dig up a mention of Rivas Hernandez in D4vd’s Discord server. When he and a friend typed the word “Celeste” into the search bar, they were flabbergasted to find an exchange from August 2024, more than a year before her body was found. D4vd had posted in the general chat: “Im in a song crisis right now.” It was unclear whether he was looking for suggestions, just venting, or trying to stir up conversation, but the server lit up in response. It was a rare, exciting occurrence. One of the dozens of responses was from a user whose account has since been deleted. It read: “Drop the one with the missing girl celeste rivas hernandez.”
Ghost stared at his computer screen, eyes wide like saucers, feeling the weight of a girl’s death on his shoulders. There was no other way he could interpret the message: At least one person in the Discord server knew Rivas Hernandez by name—and they knew she’d been missing. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is big,’” Ghost says.
Beads of sweat dripped onto his mousepad as Ghost realized that some messages in the server were being deleted in real time. He wondered what kind of incriminating information moderators, or even D4vd himself, might be trying to hide. They’d already disabled the chat, and Ghost worried it was only a matter of time before they wiped the server completely. He remembers thinking: “I have access to the server that’s being limited as we speak, and I’m gonna do everything in my power to archive it. My only chance is now. If I miss that chance, I won’t be able to do anything.”
“Ethical hacker” Ghost noticed, in real time, that a moderator was deleting posts in D4vd’s Discord server.Source: "D4vd's Closet" Discord serverFrom his bedroom in his parents’ home, Ghost used his security token on Discord to extract data from the server. The entire download of some 3.7 gigabytes took about nine hours. Ghost spent much of that time nervously pacing back and forth across his room. When the download was complete, he uploaded the HTML code to the Internet Archive and shared it on r/d4vd. The subreddit went wild with speculation.
A few days later, May, a 22-year-old law student in the Netherlands, was snooping around d4vd’s closet when she noticed the same thing as Ghost. “That was very suspicious to me. Why are there messages getting deleted?” she wondered. Seeking to validate her suspicions and crowdsource intelligence, May sounded the alarm on r/d4vd. “My post blew up. I got over 550,000 views on it. A bunch of people started DMing me,” May says. “People started sending me information.”
May, a research-obsessed paralegal, considered herself a rational person who cares deeply about the truth. She was never a fan of D4vd’s, but something about the mythology of his music and the brutality of Rivas Hernandez’s death nagged at her. She became determined to get to the bottom of it.
Scrolling through r/d4vd one night, May landed on a screenshot that made her gasp. It showed a message Safiyya had sent in the general chat of D4vd’s Discord server in late 2024, roughly a year earlier. Members had been lamenting that D4vd had gotten too popular and wasn’t engaging with them online the way he once did. One member said that she used to chat with D4vd over Instagram and Snapchat DMs. Safiyya, who noted that she’d seen D4vd’s Twitch streams go from attracting 10,000 viewers to more than 100,000, had a flex of her own: “One time, he called me cause he tryna delete that stream with his gf.”
Moderator Safiyya telling D4vd’s Discord server about the musician asking her to delete a Twitch stream.Source: "D4vd's Closet" Discord serverMay believed, like a lot of other redditors who had been snooping around, that the girlfriend in question was Rivas Hernandez. She pored over other screenshots of messages Safiyya had sent in the Discord chat over the years—including some that referenced Epstein and pedophilia—and began to view her with intense suspicion. Why was Safiyya asked to delete the livestream? Had she known that D4vd’s girlfriend was a minor? And how could she have ignored the chilling message in the chat about “the missing girl Celeste Rivas Hernandez?”
Two weeks after D4vd’s Discord erupted into chaos, Safiyya felt her life was spiraling out of control. Before, the server had been a constant companion and source of comfort: a near-endless stream of conversations that she could always drop in and out of when she needed a laugh or wanted to distract herself with memes. Plus, it had given her a purpose, a responsibility and direction outside of work. Now the Discord server was locked, and Safiyya’s direct messages were brimming with questions from suspicious outsiders who had joined the once insular online community. All of them, it seemed, felt called to search for answers in the absence of any updates, press conferences, or official statements about the case from the LAPD.
At first, Safiyya shrugged off some of the messages she received as harmless, if not creepy, trolling. When a stranger demanded she confess “everything you know about Celeste and David,” Safiyya responded glibly. “Idk david in person 😭😭” she wrote. “Lmfaooo.” She was telling the truth, she says: As much as she’d yearned to have a real friendship with D4vd, she barely knew him at all. For the most part, he ignored her when she messaged him on Discord or responded to his Instagram stories. He’d only ever tried to FaceTime her that one time, she says.
“Do not reveal any information with others,” the stranger responded, assuming an air of authority. “Bet,” she wrote back, attempting to call their bluff. The message exchange had taken place on September 13, five days before Rivas Hernandez had been publicly identified by the LAPD. But after the 14-year-old was confirmed as the deceased, it began to sink in for Safiyya that D4vd might not be as innocent as she’d once assumed. She’d long heard that he had a girlfriend named Celeste, and she’d even seen a user with the display name “Celeste” interact with him in the server. “Celeste in here??” D4vd, who had a crown emoji next to this display name and a badge signifying he was the owner of the server, posted in the chat in October 2022. “HI DAVID BARKKK,” this user wrote back, riffing on D4vd’s full name, David Burke.
According to their profile, “Celeste” had created a Discord account in January 2021 and belonged to two of the same servers as Safiyya: d4vd’s closet and one called E-Girl Paradise, which bills itself as a forum for socializing and dating (channels in that server include “freaky-chat,” “match-making” and “goon-corner”). Safiyya maintains that she didn’t know this user’s real age; after all, their profile displayed a badge—granted by moderators of servers—showing that they were over the age of 18. Another badge proclaimed: “Number 1 Fan.” (A spokesperson for Discord said these “server roles” are not determined or verified by the company. “We require all users to be at least 13 years old and believe that nowhere is our safety work more important than with teens,” the company said in a statement to WIRED).
As sleuths sifted through the Discord server, Safiyya’s username came up time and again. In one conversation from late 2024, Safiyya seemed to have knowledge of a user named Celeste, referring to her as D4vd’s ex. She had theorized that D4vd’s bitter elegy, “My House Is Not a Home,” with lyrics like “You didn’t want to fall in love / You’re looking out for yourself now,” must have been written about their breakup. At the time, she says, she believed that D4vd had a new girlfriend, with a different username on Discord. Online investigators were convinced that this supposed new girlfriend was actually the same person—a subversion of the doppelgänger conspiracy—and it looked to some of them, May and Ghost included, like Safiyya was covering for D4vd.
The aggressive messages Safiyya had been receiving, she realized, weren’t just trolling. They were serious; some of them were even death threats. Every time her phone pinged, Safiyya’s body filled with dread. She became terrified to leave her parents’ house. She hadn’t told them about the online harassment—she didn’t want to worry them—but maybe there were signs: She’d dyed her hair a different color after redditors posted a photo of her from D4vd’s Discord server. She’d thought about getting a lawyer, but she couldn’t afford one. Instead, she resigned herself to mounting her own defense online.
On the night of September 22, she took a deep breath and began responding to accusations on r/d4vd. She tried to explain that she helped D4vd delete a Twitch livestream because the video had violated Twitch’s community guidelines: The girl in it, whom Safiyya knew to be D4vd’s girlfriend “Celeste,” had made a reference to the sexual assault of children. Safiyya had shrugged it off as an awkward joke in poor taste. It never occurred to her that the girl in the video might have been a minor herself. As for the message about “the missing girl,” Safiyya insisted, she simply didn’t see it. She says she once believed that D4vd and the Discord user named “Celeste” had broken up. But now, she too subscribed to the theory that D4vd, growing increasingly paranoid, had convinced Rivas Hernandez to rejoin the server under a different username, to conceal her true age and identity.
Others might have logged off, but Safiyya doubled down. She invited her online haters to join her personal Discord server and ask her questions directly. The thought of it made her buzz with anxiety: She describes herself as “antisocial,” but she was desperate to be understood. She was upset, too, about Rivas Hernandez’s death and how at least one member of d4vd’s closet had known she’d been reported missing. Safiyya worried that she’d failed this 14-year-old girl she’d never met but now found herself thinking of constantly. She remembered the sound of the girl in the hoodie’s rambunctious laughter in the Twitch livestream, the confidence in her voice. Safiyya wondered if maybe the laughter had been masking fear.
Safiyya, like Sarah, knew what it was like to be preyed upon online. Safiyya wasn’t much older than Rivas Hernandez—15 or 16, she thinks—when she was propositioned by an adult on an anonymous video chat site called Omegle. (The company shut down in 2023 after settling multiple lawsuits on behalf of minors who alleged they’d met sexual predators on the platform.) Safiyya hoped that by continuing to talk about D4vd’s Discord server publicly she might encourage other moderators to come forward and share what they knew, if anything, about Rivas Hernandez.
May, in the Netherlands, and Sarah, in Oregon, were among the small group of redditors who joined Safiyya’s server, hungry for answers. At first, Sarah wasn’t sure what to think of Safiyya’s defense. But when she started responding by audio call, Sarah recognized the pain in her soft, shaky voice. She felt Safiyya must be telling the truth. “I could tell that she was really hurt ’cause she was moderating for this person that she looked up to, and then all this came out and now she’s totally crushed,” says Sarah. “She was so overwhelmed, and I felt so bad ’cause she’s young too.”
Because Sarah had been in D4vd’s Discord server since early 2024, she was familiar with the brand of off-color humor that dominated it. She felt that Safiyya’s posts about Epstein had been taken out of context. “I knew she was just making edgy jokes, you know, trying to fit in with this group of people,” Sarah says. “People have been trying to paint her as this evil protector of a child predator, which she’s not.”
May, too, softened after discovering that Safiyya wasn’t an all-knowing insider. In hindsight, the idea seemed almost absurd, proof of how the internet can distort reality. The way Safiyya tells it, she’d spent countless hours helping to cultivate a fan base for someone she’d never met and who almost uniformly ignored her online. Even Safiyya’s attempts to score free merchandise from D4vd’s label, a perk she’d heard other Discord moderators received, were rebuffed. “I’m not even gonna lie; I put too much effort into reviving his server,” says Safiyya, adding that she sometimes spent her own money buying upgrades, like a Minecraft plug-in, for it. “He didn’t appreciate my work.”
Safiyya had, at one time, hoped to join the volunteer team of Discord mods that worked directly withD4vd’s label to help with marketing efforts, she says. Finding out about new releases before anyone else would’ve been exciting, Safiyya thought, and maybe she’d learn something that could help boost her nascent career as a gaming streamer. But Safiyya was never accepted as a member of the team. In retrospect, she sees it as a huge relief: She’s glad she didn’t know what was really going on behind the scenes. Then again, she thinks, maybe if she’d known something about Rivas Hernandez, she could’ve helped her.
As the months dragged on, sleuths grew frustrated and disillusioned with the lack of visible progress from the justice system. Some started to lose hope. Others, citing D4vd’s macabre lyrics and his knife-wielding Itami character, feared he might kill himself before he faced criminal charges. To a lot of amateur investigators, the online evidence was glaring—and what of the possible DNA that professionals are tasked with collecting? Or the surveillance footage that may have been captured by Tesla cameras? Whatever was causing the case to linger, the LAPD, at least during the course of its investigation, wasn’t saying.
In fact, the agency had actively taken steps to conceal information about the case. In late November 2025, it placed a security hold on Rivas Hernandez’s autopsy, preventing it from being released to the public. In a statement, the LA County chief medical examiner, Odey Ukpo, sharply rebuked the decision. “Since becoming the department head, I’ve worked on eradicating the practice of placing security holds on medical examiner cases simply by law enforcement request,” he said. “The practice of security holds is virtually unheard of in other counties and has not been proven to improve outcomes in the legal system.”
By the start of 2026, some true-crime enthusiasts, like Amanda, the speech-language pathologist in Texas, had already stepped away from the case, feeling as if there might never be a satisfying resolution. Amanda had once been an active member of r/CelesteRivasHernandez, even going so far as to compile and share a seven-page, single-spaced timeline of events potentially related to the crime. But she hasn’t posted on Reddit in months; she felt alienated by redditors she thinks went too far by harassing anyone associated with D4vd.
In late February, Collins, the model and actor who appeared in one of D4vd’s music videos and in many of his photos, posted a statement on r/d4vdiots in which she stressed that she is no longer friends with D4vd and asked for privacy. “You guys do not know everything going on as much as you have done digging. I am also lost as well. The harassment has gotten horrible,” she wrote. “I have had people track me down at work, stalk me, threaten to kill me, threaten to eat me, chop me up, you name it. Yet people don’t know how hard I am working in silence to bring justice to Celeste Rivas in the ways that I can.”
A couple of weeks later, Neo Langston posted his own statement on his Instagram story. “I understand due to my silence and the silence in general it leaves a void of information that everyone wants to fill,” he wrote. “But at the end of the day this case isn’t about me, it isn’t about you, it’s about getting justice for the victim and her family and I care a lot more about that then [sic] trying to fill that void because of public opinion.” (Neither Collins nor Langston responded to WIRED’s request for comment.)
Photo-illustration: Elizabeth Renstrom; Getty ImagesAll the while, Sarah and May kept digging. They’d been chatting in a Discord group for months, swapping intel with Safiyya and a private investigator named Steve Fischer, whom Sarah had connected with on X after noticing his viral tweets about the case. Together, they shared theories, scrutinized social media posts, and speculated about accounts they believed were secretly D4vd. (They say D4vd has been known to use burners and back-up accounts under different aliases).
When unreleased tracks from D4vd’s deluxe album leaked online in mid-March, they wondered if he himself had been responsible. Sarah put together a document cataloging the most suspicious of the new song lyrics. Among them: “I’ve been trying to erase you, it makes me feel like an asshole. Just got rid of my tattoo, I always knew it wouldn’t last long.” Often, the group bemoaned the lack of communication from law enforcement. “Why the silence? Why no transparency? Why no charges? What are they hiding? Is this a blown investigation?” Fischer posted on X just before noon on Thursday, April 16.
Less than six hours later, Safiyya was having dinner with some friends when she got a new Discord message from May: D4vd had been arrested.
The moment they worried might never materialize was finally here, suddenly, and without warning. Safiyya was overcome with relief, but she also had a ton of questions. Among them: Why had it taken the LAPD seven months to take D4vd into custody? And had he been hiding out in the Hollywood Hills mansion where he was arrested that whole time? Safiyya assumed he’d gone back to Texas or maybe even fled the country, like she’d seen other suspected murderers do in true-crime documentaries.
The following Monday, Safiyya, Sarah, and May each watched, from three different countries and time zones, the livestream of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s press conference—the first one held by authorities in the case involving Rivas Hernandez. The sleuths soon discovered, along with the rest of the world, that the case was even more twisted than they’d imagined: According to LA County district attorney Nathan Hochman, the LAPD had been investigating D4vd for lewd and lascivious sexual acts at the time of Rivas Hernandez’s murder. The 14-year-old had been a witness in the investigation, and she was killed by D4vd, Hochman alleged, as a way “to maintain his very lucrative music career that Celeste was threatening” when she came over to his home on the night of April 23, 2025. She “was never heard from again.”
Hochman announced that his office was charging D4vd with first-degree murder with special circumstances, which carries a maximum sentence of either life without the possibility of parole or the death penalty, along with additional charges related to sexual abuse and mutilating human remains. D4vd has pleaded not guilty. “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,” his attorneys said in a statement. “We will vigorously defend David’s innocence.” When it was his turn at the podium, LAPD chief Jim McDonnell defended his department’s investigation and its lack of communication with the public. “My duty is not to fuel speculation. It’s to deliver justice, and that requires patience and discipline on everybody’s part,” he said, flanked by an easel on either side of him: On one, a poster of Rivas Hernandez; on the other, a poster of David Burke’s booking photo. “We had to be certain that nothing we did or said would ever jeopardize this case.”
Journalists took pictures of a booking photo of David Anthony Burke, known as D4vd, before the start of a press briefing on the case against him.Photograph: FREDERIC J. BROWN/ Getty ImagesThe day after the press conference, Rivas Hernandez’s family issued their first public statement in the seven months since their daughter had been murdered. (They, like the LAPD, had been publicly criticized for their silence during the investigation.) “Celeste was a beautiful, strong girl who loved to sing and dance. Every Friday was movie night and we spent wonderful times together,” they said through their lawyer. “We love her very much and she always told us that she loved us. We miss her deeply. All we want is Justice for Celeste.” The following day, on April 22, the Medical Examiner released a report stating that Rivas Hernandez’s cause of death was multiple penetrating injuries, including a stab wound on her right abdomen and another on her left chest, “caused by object(s).”
May had watched the livestream from her laptop at her school library, where she’d been studying for an upcoming exam. She knew she wasn’t going to get any more schoolwork done that night. May couldn’t get over the date that Rivas Hernandez was allegedly killed. The timing of it, May realized, coincided with D4vd’s aggressive promotion of his latest album: On April 23, 2025, allegedly the last day of Rivas-Hernandez’s short life, D4vd had posted a TikTok of himself dancing and pointing to the vinyl edition of Withered. “Your prayers have been answered it’s finally here,” he captioned it. His giddy front-facing camera videos continued over the next several days. “It’s actually so disgusting to think about that,” May says.
On September 25, 2025, intimate notes, candles, and flowers filled a hometown memorial for Celeste Rivas Hernandez.Photograph: Gina Ferazzi/Getty ImagesMay and Sarah still haven’t given up on their own DIY investigation. Armed with new information from the press conference, they plan to keep scouring D4vd’s Discord server and reviewing his old social media posts to see what else they can find.
Safiyya, on the other hand, is trying to log off. Sometimes it feels like weaning herself off a drug. “At first, it was so, so hard,” she says. But it’s gotten a little easier with time. She still gets nervous a lot, but she’s been making an effort to go outside more, to touch grass, to get exercise. Simple things. Things she never used to do much of. Even when she was in college, she says, her internet habits—between gaming and streaming and Discord—became so time-consuming that she stopped going to class and eventually dropped out.
Lately, she’s been thinking about going back to school to finish her degree. She used to want to be a legal assistant or maybe a journalist. She likes writing, but not so much talking to people. Now she’s thinking maybe a teacher or nurse. “I like kids,” Safiyya says. “Not in a weird way. I like taking care of kids. Someday, I want to be a good mom, if I ever have kids.” If she does, she thinks, she’ll want to keep them off the internet for as long as possible.
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