LOS ANGELES (AP) — Text messages between singer D4vd and Celeste Rivas Hernandez shown in court Friday indicate she had gotten pregnant at age 13 and had an abortion more than a year before she was killed.
In one exchange in early January 2024, D4vd, whose legal name is David Burke, apologizes for “putting her through this.”
“It’s okay,” she said in a text, “neither of us are capable of watching and taking care of the baby. it’s for the best no?”
He
later apologizes again before asking if it’s his, and she replies, “of course it’s yours David.”
The testimony came during a preliminary hearing where a judge will decide if Burke should go on trial in Rivas Hernandez's killing. Prosecutors are seeking to prove Burke began sexually abusing Rivas Hernandez when she was 13 and he was 18, then stabbed her to death when she threatened to reveal their long sexual history and crater a career that had earned him millions.
They allege he dismembered the body in his garage, and a police analyst testified in the preliminary hearing that samples pulled from apparent blood stains there matched Rivas Hernandez's DNA. Her body was discovered in the trunk of a Tesla that had been towed from the Hollywood Hills in September, nearly five months after authorities said she was killed. The Tesla was registered to Burke.
Burke has pleaded not guilty to murder, sexual abuse of a child and mutilation of a body, and his lawyers have said he is innocent.
Prosecutors spent Friday afternoon detailing the nature of the relationship between Burke and Rivas Hernandez. Photos of the two of them kissing and lying in bed were shown in court. The pictures showed that she had “David” tattooed in red ink on a finger — one of two that had been cut off when her body was found.
Then Los Angeles police detective Corey Farrell described one-by-one more than three dozen photos of the two of them that could not be shown in court because they depicted explicit sexual abuse. Rivas Hernandez was 13 and 14 in the photos.
Rivas Hernandez’s mother began crying and her father looked down as the detective began describing the images.
Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman came over to comfort the mother, Mercedes Martinez, and the couple got up and left the courtroom.
The images were recovered from his iPhone that was seized during a search of his home. The text message conversations taken from his iCloud account often discussed contraception and pregnancy, and in early January 2024, they discuss the abortion.
In a text conversation months later, she says she regretted that she “took a innocent life of a literal baby.”
She asks Burke if anyone knows they have sex, and he replied “nope and i want to keep it that way until we married.”
Rivas Hernandez turned 14 in September 2024 and soon after traveled with Burke to London and to Texas to meet his family.
Messages after that show tension growing between them.
In one text in November 2024, she says: “i literally had sex with you for almost a year straight.” He tells her she's acting like it's their first breakup when it's their eighth.
The detective returns to the stand Monday for the fifth and likely final day of the preliminary hearing.
Earlier in the day, the doctor who performed the autopsy on Rivas Hernandez gave the difficult details of her death.
Much of what Dr. Grant Ho of the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner said on the stand was already known: She had been killed by two sharp force wounds to her upper body.
But the details he shared of what the autopsy showed — and tellingly, what it was unable to determine because of how degraded her body was when it was found — were part of what made Friday's proceedings perhaps the most difficult so far.
Ho testified that he could not say when the death occurred — one of many challenges brought on by the body's degradation.
“It’s extremely difficult to tell,” Ho said.
He said she had been dead for “at least weeks,” later adding that it also could have been months.
Authorities say Burke sent a car to pick up Rivas Hernandez on April 23, 2025, from her hometown of Lake Elsinore, California, some 80 miles (129 km) outside Los Angeles. They exchanged messages until she arrived at his home, after which her phone went dead.
Her body was found in the front trunk of the Tesla registered to Burke on Sept. 8, 2025 — the day after she would have turned 15.
“She didn’t make it to her 15th birthday, correct?” Silverman asked. “Correct,” Ho replied.
Ho said there were many “skin defects” that could have been postmortem, but the two he identified as potential stab wounds had related internal trauma. One wound on the abdomen penetrated her liver. Another, on the left chest, damaged her ribs.
He testified that toxicology tests, done only on her liver because no blood was available, initially showed positives for benzodiazepines — medications typically used for anxiety — and methamphetamine. He said with further testing the benzodiazepine was negative. The methamphetamine was inconclusive, and as a result Ho said “I cannot say that it played any role in the death.”
Burke's attorney, Marilyn Bednarski, asked if decomposition could affect the accuracy of drug test results, and Ho agreed it could.
“In the toxicology report there is not enough information to support an overdose death, correct?” Bednarski asked. Ho said she was correct.
Bednarski asked if it helps in an autopsy examination to talk to the friends and family of the deceased about their life — if they had a mental health issue, were suicidal, were a frequent drug user or were violent.
Ho answered “potentially” to each of those but said there were no such conversations in this case.
Under the name D4vd (pronounced “David”), became an online musical phenomenon as a teen with a blend of indie rock, R&B and lo-fi pop. He had huge followings on TikTok, Soundcloud and Spotify, where his top songs, including his 2022 breakthrough “Romantic Homicide,” have more than a billion plays.
He opened for SZA on tour in 2023 and in 2024 he played the Coachella music festival and released his first full-length album, “Withered,” two days after when authorities say Rivas Hernandez was killed.
