Cops in Los Angeles on Thursday cuffed 21 year-old alt-R&B artist David “D4VD” Burke on a probable cause warrant eight months after the badly-decomposed remains of 14 year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez were discovered in the trunk of his Tesla that had been abandoned on the side of a street in the Hollywood Hills, ABC News reports on the wheels of justice turning maddeningly slowly.
Note that it said “probable cause warrant” and not an indictment, although the DA’s presenting on Monday and one would hope the case is buttoned up. Still this was freaking nuts how it was in November, two months after Hernandez’s body was found when a worker at an impound lot – the Tesla had been abandoned in July – noticed an odor from the vehicle and called the cops, that the LAPD had publicly announced that Burke was considered a suspect in the homicide. This was amid a whole shit ton of not-at-all ambiguous evidence that Burke was in a sexual relationship with the troubled teen who had last been seen by her parents three months before the car was abandoned.
Is it hard for a famous guy to flee? Maybe. Nobody seized his goddamned passport though. Nobody made sure the DA didn’t have to hire fucking Dog the Bounty Hunter to track him down in Honduras or Bahrain or stop him from crossing the DMZ and defecting to North Korea. You can call that armchair quarterbacking all you want but from this armchair it sure looked like law enforcement had their dicks in their hands while a statutory rapist and sex trafficker roamed freely for five months after he publicly reported to be under their scrutiny for gruesomely murdering a 14 year-old girl.