D4vd exchanged a series of text messages with his alleged murder victim Celeste Rivas Hernandez about an abortion she purportedly had in January 2024, when she was 13, and he was an adult, according to phone records presented by prosecutors on Friday.
The messages were recovered from a phone found in the singer’s Los Angeles home, along with what investigators described as a large collection of child sexual abuse material involving Rivas. The platinum-selling singer, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke, is accused of killing Rivas on April 23, 2025, after she threatened to disclose the alleged abuse. Prosecutors say he later dismembered her body with a chainsaw inside a blue inflatable pool in his three-car garage. Burke has denied the allegations.
Testifying as the prosecution’s final witness at a hearing to determine whether Burke should stand trial, Detective Corey Farell of the Los Angeles Police Department read the messages aloud and described dozens of images that he said documented Burke’s sexual abuse of Rivas. Prosecutors said the images, which depicted sex acts at Burke’s home, were too graphic to display in court. Farell said one screenshot recovered from Burke’s phone showed that his lock screen at one point was a photograph of him and Rivas embracing while both were naked from the waist up.
During a description of one photo allegedly showing penetration, Rivas’ mother, Mercedes Martínez, began to cry while seated in the gallery. Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman walked over to comfort Martínez, telling her, “I really think this is stuff you don’t need to hear. I just think it’s too much.” Martínez then got up and walked out of the courtroom in tears, along with Jesus Rivas, the teen’s father.
The text messages, spanning November 2023 through April 2025, showed that Rivas repeatedly told Burke she feared she was pregnant. The earliest such message presented in court was from late November 2023, around the time prosecutors allege Burke began a sexual relationship with her.
“Currently [manifesting] my period bc I refuse to have kids,” Rivas wrote. Burke allegedly replied, “Did you miss your date.” He urged her to begin tracking her menstrual cycle with an app. “I just need to make sure ur on top of ur shit,” he allegedly wrote.
According to Farell’s testimony, Rivas did get pregnant and had an abortion in early January 2024. In the days before the termination, Rivas allegedly texted Burke, “Both of us aren’t able to take care of it.” Burke allegedly replied, “you’re sm [so much] stronger than me baby lmao,” and “I love you.” He then told Rivas his mother had advised him to question paternity if he ever found himself in “this situation.” He asked, “It is mine right?”
Rivas replied: “Of course it’s yours David.” He then asked when the appointment was, told her “it should take 45,” and followed up after, asking, “how it go,” saying he felt like he was “waiting for test results,” the detective testified.
Burke’s communication with Rivas dated back to 2022, when Rivas would have been 11 years old, Farell testified. The singer’s texts, as read in court, were often sexually explicit and controlling. Hers were at times affectionate, but often distressed. In one exchange on June 11, 2024, Burke allegedly wrote, “I can’t wait to move in together without the cops bitchin.” She replied that she missed him deeply. A few hours later, he said he wanted to gather her documents so they could “dip out the country n get married in Italy.”
Soon afterward, Rivas wrote that she feared she might be pregnant again. “I don’t like this,” she said, asking, “what if the first abortion didn’t work.”
Burke allegedly replied, “You would have a baby bump lmao you have hella periods since then, what you smoking.” He added, “nah first baby gone.” A few days later, on June 13, he told Rivas he obtained a credit card for her to use. “I just want no posters and u to be able to get on planes. Im able to pay,” he texted, according to Farell.
Later that month, on June 19, Rivas texted, “Ur mom know we had sex yet.” Burke replied, “She thinks that’s the first thing we gonna do when we see each other.” Rivas again expressed anxiety about contraception. “I can see u and sleep over, just do not get me pregnant.” Burke purportedly responded, “We’ve done a good job the past few months baby … The last and only time u were pregnant was because of a fucked up condom in December.”
A little more than a week later, Rivas texted Burke on June 27 that she had to run to the bathroom after they last had sex because “it hurt.” Burke was dismissive in his reply. “Nuh uh,” he texted back. “I remember every time you say ow when we fuck. … Last time u aint say ow once.”
In another text exchange on July 10, Rivas asked, “Does anyone know we even had sex?” He rallegedly eplied, “Nope, and I would like to keep it that way before we married.” He then added, “Let’s get married next year and make the baby simplee,” the detective said.
By Aug. 30, 2024, Rivas sent a series of distraught texts to Burke, expressing regret over the abortion. “Realistically I care abt u. I killed my kid for you,” she wrote. When she added that she “would have been there for it,” had they proceeded with the pregnancy, Burke responded that she would have been acting “selfishly.”
“David, I’m going to have to lie to people around me, even my kid, for the rest of my life,” she texted back. “I don’t like talking about it because it gets me really upset, but I’d do anything to have it back.”
Burke’s reply to the 13-year-old girl was cold: “Let’s end that there.” He texted, “I don’t like talking to u when you’re upset.” When Rivas asked how he felt about the abortion, he replied, “I’m saddened by it, I’m even more saddened by the way it was conceived, outside of marriage and outside of the way I had pictured my first child going. …But I don’t dwell on it.”
That September, Rivas twice texted Burke that she was “scared” about an unwanted pregnancy. On Nov. 7, 2024, Rivas texted, “I literally had sex with you for almost a year straight.” Burke allegedly replied, “Like I said last night ur treating this like the first breakup. …This is the eighth time,” Farell testified.
Other messages shown in court depicted Burke blaming Rivas after they had sex in late December 2024, after the date prosecutors say they broke up. “You asked me if I wanted to have sex, and I folded,” he allegedly texted on Dec. 20. “Then we stopped, and you cried, and I held you.”
Rivas pushed back. “No I didn’t, David,” she replied. “We made out and I was gonna go home.”
About a month before the alleged murder, Burke and Rivas were still in communication, with the alleged sexual abuse ongoing, Farell testified. On March 14, 2025, Rivas texted, “We can be friends but like online. I don’t want anything to do with you in person anymore if I’m gonna try and move on.” She added, “All we do is have sex and just hang out man I want more than that for myself.”
In other significant testimony on Friday, Farell said Burke wrote in a December 2023 text to Rivas that he used the alias Trayvion Davis for “all my packages n everything.”
The message was notable because another detective, Joshua Byers, testified earlier in the hearing that Burke used the same alias to buy two chainsaws, a cadaver body bag, heavy-duty laundry bags, and an inflatable pool from Amazon in early May 2025, shortly after the alleged murder. Byers said Burke bought a third chainsaw from Home Depot around the same time and had it delivered through Uber Postmates. That saw, a 10-inch Makita, was never recovered.
Farell also read texts between Burke and Rivas that purportedly show they had a plan to move in together, dubbed “Operation Awesome,” in February 2024, a month after the alleged abortion. When Rivas texted that she didn’t know what to bring, Burke allegedly replied, “WE BEEN OVER THIS FOR WEEKS … anything u use that I can’t replace immediately u bring … clothes u like, makeup, jewelry, shoes.” He said he would bring two duffle bags and later texted that he was coming to pick her up in Lake Elsinore, according to the texts read in court.
In a text on Feb 13, 2024, Burke allegedly asked Rivas if she wanted him to “hide out somewhere” near her house and have his bodyguard bring her to his car. “Omg no that’s so embarrassing dude,” she texted back.
“Baby,” he purportedly replied. “This Is the most important day or ur life next to da wedding day and you’re worried about being embarrassed?” (Rivas’ parents first reported her missing two days later on Feb. 15, 2024, call logs from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department confirm.)
Before Farell took the stand, the court heard from Dr. Grant Ho, the medical examiner who performed Rivas’ autopsy. One of Burke’s attorneys, Marilyn Bednarski, offered a glimpse of his possible defense as she questioned Ho about how his office concluded Rivas died from “multiple penetrating injuries” inflicted by another person. Over more than an hour, Bednarski suggested that Rivas may have taken some action that set in motion the events leading to her death.
She first asked whether “collateral information” about a victim’s history could help determine a cause of death, such as whether the person had been “potentially suicidal,” frequently used drugs, or had a history of violence. Dr. Ho acknowledged such information could “potentially” affect a determination. He added that he did not speak with Rivas’ family before his office ruled her death a homicide.
The defense lawyer then focused on the two penetrating wounds found on Rivas’ body. During his direct testimony, Dr. Ho said the lower wound, in Rivas’ abdomen, was about 1.5 inches deep and penetrated her liver. A second wound, on the left side of her chest, was about two inches deep and entered near her lung, damaging the surface of an adjacent rib.
Bednarski asked whether Dr. Ho could determine who had been “holding the instrument” that caused the wounds on which the homicide ruling was based. He said he could not.
“So you can’t rule out that she could have been holding the instrument,” Bednarski said.
“That is a consideration,” Dr. Ho replied, “but we would expect to find hesitation marks,” meaning superficial wounds around the deeper injury.
“Is it fair to say you don’t know the circumstances under which these wounds occurred?” Bednarski asked.
“Correct,” he said.
Bednarski then questioned what the autopsy could reveal about Rivas’ position when she was wounded. She asked whether Dr. Ho could determine if her body was moving toward the instrument at the moment of contact, or at what speed it might have been moving. He said he could not determine either.
Ho’s direct testimony was accompanied by a sequence of gruesome photographs from Rivas’ autopsy, some of which prompted audible gasps from people gathered in the courtroom. Among the most harrowing was an overhead photograph of Rivas’ body pieced back together on a metal table, her face skeletonized. Burke stared quietly at the screen, his elbow resting on the defense table and his chin propped on a closed hand that partly covered his mouth.
Elsewhere in his testimony, Ho touched on several elements of the prosecution’s case. Regarding their contention that Burke used a chainsaw to dismember Rivas, Ho said that “going through bone would require [a] power tool.” Of the powerful smell a decomposing body produces, Ho noted the stench was noticeable down the hall from the autopsy room. And of the prosecution’s claim that Burke stabbed Rivas to death, the Deputy Medical Examiner said the wound to her lower liver was consistent with being stabbed in the stomach.
In their preliminary hearing brief, prosecutors alleged that Burke “stood by while [Rivas] bled out.” Dr. Ho testified that she could have bled to death within “minutes.” When Silverman asked if it could’ve taken hours, Ho replied, “Potentially.”
Rivas’ severely decomposed remains were found Sept. 8, 2025, divided between two black vinyl and plastic bags in the vehicle’s front trunk. Burke has pleaded not guilty to murder, continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14 and unlawful mutilation of human remains. His lawyers say he did not kill Rivas or cause her death.
Earlier this week, the court heard from Los Angeles police criminalist Samantha Tosch, who testified that Burke’s DNA was included in a mixture found on an outer trash bag recovered from his garage. An inner bag held stained wipes that tested presumptively positive for blood. DNA on one wipe was three trillion times more likely to have come from Rivas than from an unknown person, Tosch said. Burke’s DNA was not detected on the wipe.
Tosch said Rivas’ DNA was also found on a rowing machine, a black rubber floor mat, a Tesla charger, and a green tarp in the garage. It was further detected in a rear compartment of Burke’s Tesla, separate from the front trunk where her remains were found.
Under cross-examination, Tosch acknowledged that DNA can be transferred without direct contact and that police software only calculated the likelihood of Burke’s inclusion in the mixture, nothing definitive. She nevertheless said it was her professional opinion that his DNA was present on the trash bag.
Another criminalist, Lisa LaHendro, testified that fragments of blue material recovered from Rivas’ remains aligned with holes in an inflatable pool found in Burke’s garage. Prosecutors allege Burke dismembered Rivas in the pool to collect the blood.
Criminalist Lauren Wallace testified that Bluestar, a chemical used to detect possible blood, produced strong reactions on the rubber mats covering the garage floor and on the bricks beneath them. She said investigators did not collect two chainsaws from the garage or a third electric saw from upstairs because they tested negative for possible blood and were not considered forensically valuable.
Detective William Roecker testified that cell-tower records tracking Burke’s phone and the modem in his Tesla showed the phone and car traveling together from his home to a remote area of Santa Barbara County three times after the alleged murder. The first trip began around 11:31 p.m. on April 23, about an hour after when prosecutors say Rivas was killed. The phone and Tesla traveled to a “pretty desolate” area off Highway 154, near where a transit worker later found Rivas’ passport card. The phone and Tesla returned to Burke’s home around 7 a.m., Roecker said, and later returned to the area on May 8 and May 31.
Earlier testimony established that investigators found at least 11 air fresheners inside the Tesla, including one beneath a mass of fly larvae near the concealed remains.
Detective Joshua Byers testified that Burke had “Celeste” tattooed in red cursive on his left ring finger when he was arrested. Tesla data showed Burke’s iPhone disconnecting from the vehicle on July 29, 2025, shortly before a neighbor’s camera recorded him walking back toward his home. Police license-plate readers recorded the Tesla in the same parking spot until it was impounded on Sept. 8.
Prosecutors also played body-camera footage showing sheriff’s deputies questioning Burke in February 2024, after Rivas was reported missing. Burke said he had met her online, seen her once, and believed she was 18. Prosecutors allege Burke later bought Rivas a secret phone and paid a classmate $1,000 to deliver it after her parents confiscated another device. Investigators also found evidence that Burke bought airline tickets and traveled with her to Texas and London.
Benjamin Greger, a former financial manager at Burke’s management company, testified that he discussed transferring Texas properties from Burke to his mother to protect the assets from a potential civil lawsuit.
If convicted as charged, Burke faces life in prison without parole or the death penalty. Prosecutors have not said whether they would seek a death sentence.
