LAPD officials this week announced that Alt-R&B artist David “D4vd” Burke, 20, is being considered a suspect in the death of 14 year-old Celeste Hernandez, a runaway whose body cops discovered in the trunk of a Tesla registered to Burke, a few days after it was towed from a spot in the Hollywood Hills where it had been abandoned by Burke on or before July 29th, People Magazine reports.
Hernandez’s remains were, horrifically, not intact and in an advanced state of decomposition when a worker at the impound lot noticed a foul odor emanating from the front trunk of the car belonging to the “Romantic Homicide” artist on September 8th, with it taking until the 17th for the medical examiner to make a positive ID on the teen. People’s reporting on her short life describes her as a troubled youth from Riverside County who ghosted on her family no fewer than three times in recent years, the last being in April 2024. Her family by that point was aware that she’d been dating someone named “David” but had no further contact with her after a brief call the next month.
People cites the Los Angeles Times’s reporting that Burke has a tattoo saying “Shhh…” on his right index finger and that Celeste’s mom had told TMZ her girl had the same on her very same finger.
Why it took homicide detectives in Los Angeles two goddamned months to name Burke as a suspect in the girl’s death is not clear. The easiest answer lies in California’s lack of a felony abuse of a corpse statute – the usual go-to in other states to keep a suspect held without bail when cops and DAs have this strong of circumstantial probable cause but still need more time to bring a homicide case before a grand jury. The state legislature might want to get on that copy and paste job.
Yet the lack of that shortcut doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have, you know, maybe gotten enough evidence that he was in a sexual relationship with an underage girl. Or called DHS and had them open up a sex trafficking investigation into the asshole since he probably brought her across state lines at least once. Dog murderer Kristi Noem wouldn’t have turned down this particular scalp.
Then there’s that it’s a Tesla, not a freaking 2001 Hyundai Elantra. There are like 12 cameras on the goddamned thing, recording every single second that the engine is running, and there’s zero chance that this would’ve been the LAPD and DA office’s first rodeo when it comes to extracting the footage from the vehicle’s storage and/or subpoenaing it from Ketamine Brain’s cloud servers.
This is baffling and it’s hard to see a version of this where D4vd had only 34,000 TikTok followers and not 3.4 million where he’d already be behind bars awaiting trial. Yes, evidently they’re proceeding with super extra mega caution because Mark Geragos is a fucking weasel and they know he’s already five steps ahead of them irrespective of whether D4vd’s even hired him yet.
At the same time it’s like why not just hand the kid the keys to the white Bronco now and embarrass yourselves again. Those scars have had three decades to heal, might as well reopen them.