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About 75 miles from Hollywood, an animated high school science teacher held his phone screen up to his students. He had taught Celeste Rivas Hernandez years ago, he told the class, displaying a photo of himself alongside her. Rivas Hernandez, a 15-year-old girl who was found dead this month in the trunk of an impounded Tesla, had, he added, “been missing since I taught her.”
The remarks, as displayed in footage obtained by TMZ, were among the latest installments in the trail of breadcrumbs left behind about Rivas Hernandez and D4vd, the 20-year-old Los Angeles singer to whom the Tesla is registered, and a testament to the morbid interest that has accompanied it. After receiving a report of a rotting odor coming from a car in an impound lot near the Hollywood Hills home where D4vd had been staying, authorities identified Rivas Hernandez’s dismembered corpse. On Monday, days after police raided the property, the homeowner told the Daily Mail that D4vd’s manager broke his $20,000-per-month lease.
A suspect has not been named in the investigation into Rivas Hernandez’s death, and D4vd has not been accused of any wrongdoing. The intrigue surrounding the case has largely centered on the correspondences between Rivas Hernandez and D4vd’s lives. An unreleased Dv4d track appeared online that included lyrics describing how the scent of a girl named Celeste, “with my name tattooed on her chest,” was sticking to the singer’s clothes. The teen had a tattoo reading “Shhh…” on her right index finger, TMZ reported, and D4vd has one in the same location. Footage surfaced of the two of them livestreaming together in the months before she went missing in 2024. (A spokesperson for D4vd said in a statement to NBC News that the singer “has been informed about what’s happened,” and “is fully cooperating with the authorities.”)
The singer’s blunt self-presentation and motifs, now often taken literally, have stoked public interest in the case. D4vd has brought a casket on stage at performances, made a music video in which one blood-soaked version of his body carries another into a trunk, and, among his many macabre lyrics delivered in a flat affect, sang in his 2022 breakout single “Romantic Homicide,” “I killed you and I didn’t even regret it.”
D4vd began making music in Houston as a homeschooled teenager. From the start, his output was tied to the social media waters in which he was swimming: He has said he grew up listening only to gospel, and that his mother suggested songwriting as an alternative when YouTube started cracking down on his montages of copyrighted video games. Landing on a wobbly mixture of bedroom pop, indie rock, and R&B, he made his debut on the Billboard Hot 100 after snippets of “Romantic Homicide” found traction on TikTok and soon signed to Interscope Records. By 2025, he was opening for SZA and sharing the front row at an Amiri runway show in Paris with J Balvin and Lucky Blue Smith.
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Dan Adler
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