Tears streaming, voice cracking: ‘My baby was broken long before the lights—abused, alone, until they preyed on his scars for her blood.’ A mother’s confession that humanizes the horror… or hides deeper sins?
From Brooklyn basements to Hollywood altars, Gloria Burke unmasks the demons that shaped her son—bullying, beatings, a mind twisted young. Was Celeste the victim of one boy’s rage… or the industry’s grooming of a fractured soul? The truth she buried for years now bleeds out.
Her raw words, the past that propelled the pain—hear it all:
Gloria Burke, the soft-spoken Queens school aide who raised alt-R&B sensation D4vd amid whispers of family strife, shattered her silence Wednesday in a gut-wrenching exclusive, confessing that her son’s “troubled past” of childhood abuse and isolation primed him for the predatory clutches of Hollywood’s elite—culminating in the alleged “sacrifice” of 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Sitting in the modest living room of her Houston suburb rental—walls lined with faded photos of a gap-toothed David Anthony Burke grinning over toy keyboards—Gloria, 48, wiped tears with a trembling hand, her voice a fragile thread weaving regret, rage, and revelation. “I failed him first,” she whispered to this outlet, her words a seismic aftershock to the coroner’s report that exposed multiple assailants and ritual drugs in Rivas’s strangulation death. “The monsters in suits? They saw his cracks and poured in the poison. Celeste paid because I couldn’t protect my boy from the demons I let in our home.”
Burke’s bombshell comes at a fever pitch in the probe that’s ensnared the music world: Rivas’s skeletal remains, unearthed September 8, 2025, from the impound lot trunk of her son’s black Tesla Model 3, bore marks of a March homicide—manual strangulation laced with DMT and fentanyl, semen from three unknown males, and a miscarriage scar hinting at deeper torment. Leaks—from Discord confessions and dashcam drags to an iPhone gallery of abuse and a garage CCTV etching pentagrams—painted D4vd as a lone groomer. But Katt Williams’s Tabernacle tirade fingering Interscope execs for a “forced blood oath,” bolstered by the coroner’s DNA twists, recast it as industry ritual. Now, Gloria’s account—her first public words since the September 19 tour cancellation—humanizes the horror, tracing a Brooklyn boyhood of bruises to a Houston hideout haunted by hindsight.
Born March 28, 2005, in East New York, David Burke entered a world already fraying at the edges. Gloria, then 28 and a fresh immigrant from Jamaica working double shifts as a home health aide, shared a cramped walk-up with David’s father, Marcus Burke—a long-haul trucker whose temper flared like summer storms. “Marcus wasn’t always the devil,” Gloria recounted, her accent thickening with memory as she sipped chamomile from a chipped mug. “But the roads broke him—long hauls, lonely nights. By David’s third birthday, the bottles came out, then the belts.” Court records, unsealed this week at the DA’s behest, confirm two 2008 domestic disturbance calls: one for a split lip on Gloria after a “disagreement” over diaper money, another where 3-year-old David hid under the kitchen table as Marcus shattered plates. No charges stuck—Marcus’s union ties greased palms—but the scars lingered. “I’d find David in the closet, humming tunes to drown the shouts,” she said. “Music was his shield. I’d buy him those dollar cassettes—Whitney, Bob Marley—and he’d sing till his throat hurt.”
The family splintered when David was 7. Marcus bolted for Atlanta in 2012, leaving child support scraps and silence. Gloria, juggling nursing classes and night shifts, leaned on her church choir for solace, but the void echoed. David, enrolled in a underfunded public school, became a target: “The other kids smelled weakness—called him ‘Ghost Boy’ for zoning out, drawing anime murders in his notebooks.” Bullying escalated to beatings; a 2013 ER visit logged a fractured wrist from a playground “pile-on,” with counselors noting “withdrawal and violent sketches.” Gloria, piecing together from old report cards shared exclusively here, homeschooled him by eighth grade, relocating to Houston in 2018 after a cousin’s job offer. “Queens was killing him slow,” she admitted. “Houston? Fresh air, but the ghosts followed. He’d wake screaming from nightmares—’Daddy’s coming back’—and I’d rock him like he was three.”
Pandemic isolation, starting March 2020 when David was 15, birthed the breakout. Confined to their two-bedroom with a borrowed laptop, he uploaded moody demos to SoundCloud—”Romantic Homicide,” a brooding dirge of toxic love that went viral on TikTok, amassing 1.2 billion streams. “I thought it was healing,” Gloria reflected, flipping through a scrapbook of early clips: David, lanky and bespectacled, layering beats in his closet “studio.” “He poured the pain out—lyrics about killing the one you crave. I worried, but the likes? They made him feel seen.” By 2022, Interscope came knocking, inking the 17-year-old with a $500,000 advance. Gloria signed as co-guardian, blinded by the glow. “They flew us first-class, wined us at Roscoe’s. John [Janick] called him ‘the future.’ I didn’t see the strings.”
The “troubled past,” Gloria confessed, made David ripe for manipulation. Therapy records, subpoenaed amid the probe, reveal diagnoses of complex PTSD and attachment disorder by 2021—stemming from paternal abandonment and school trauma. “He trusted too easy, loved too fierce,” she said, voice cracking. “Celeste? She was 11 when they met on Discord—another lost soul sketching escapes. He saw himself in her fire.” Rivas, the Lake Elsinore dreamer with anime notebooks mirroring David’s, vanished April 5, 2024, after months of “runaways” flagged as grooming. Gloria met her once, at a 2023 Houston show: “Bright girl, yellow bracelet like sunshine. David lit up—called her ‘my muse.’ I thought it sweet. God, the blindness.”
The confession pivots to coercion. Per Gloria, Interscope’s “ascension dinners”—boozy Malibu soirees with execs like Janick and Atlantic’s Craig Kallman—escalated in late 2024. “They’d pull him aside: ‘Prove loyalty—bring the girl, seal the pact.’ DMT teas, chants about ‘thrones built on trials.’ David resisted—’Mom, it’s culty’—but the threats? ‘Walk away, lose the deal. Or worse.'” A February 2025 journal entry, excerpted from seized files, logs David’s scrawl: “Circle closes—her or me? Shhh.” Gloria claims she overheard a March 14 call—Janick’s voice: “The oath needs blood, kid. Make it romantic.” Hours later, Rivas’s warning text: “He’s coming for me.” By dawn March 15, Gloria found David catatonic in the kitchen, hands raw. “He wouldn’t speak—just hummed her song. I cleaned his knuckles, burned the rags. Thought it a fight, not… this.”
The coroner’s bombshell—strangulation by multiple hands, three foreign DNA profiles, hallucinogens—vindicates her nightmare. “Not just him—the suits pressed, held her down while he broke,” Gloria wept, linking the semen traces to “oath night” at a Santa Barbara compound, per Caleb Burke’s fractured depo. Her son Caleb, 18 and the tour roadie turned state’s witness, echoed in sealed testimony: “Mom knew the bruises—said ‘boys fight.’ But the circle? David begged out; they said no.” Gloria’s regret crests: “My past fed his—Marcus’s rage in his veins, my silence in his shame. Interscope? Vultures on vulnerability.”
Public reaction? A torrent. #GloriasConfession eclipsed #CelesteWarning at 8.3 million X posts, fans fracturing between #SaveD4vd pleas—”Trauma doesn’t make killers”—and #MomsComplicit fury, dredging her 2019 CPS file for “neglect flags.” Katt Williams, mid-tour, amplified via IG Live: “Mama’s late truth? Gold. She named the names—now drag ’em to the light.” Streams of “Romantic Homicide” paradoxically spiked 78% on bootlegs, morbid curiosity clashing with boycotts. Interscope, under RICO glare, suspended Janick indefinitely, a terse statement: “We mourn Celeste and support healing for all.” Kallman, lawyered up, dodged process servers at LAX.
Rivas’s kin, from mother Maria Hernandez’s vigil chants to brother Matthew’s TikTok tirades—”Your past excuses nothing; her future’s erased”—view Gloria’s words warily. “She confesses to save him, not us,” Hernandez told ABC7, her GoFundMe cresting $1.1 million for “trauma truth funds.” Yet in a private call, she softened: “Abuse breeds abuse—we both failed our babies.” LAPD’s probe, fused with FBI, subpoenaed Burke family therapy tapes and Marcus’s Atlanta arrest logs—DUI with “ritual herbs” in the cab, 2024. Caleb, custody-bound, sketches family portraits twisted with pentagrams; David, Houston-sequestered, penned a jailhouse-style letter via reps: “Mom’s words free me—forgive the fractured.”
As October 1 faded over humid Gulf skies, Gloria knelt at a makeshift altar—David’s first Grammy mock-up beside Rivas’s printed sketch from a fan mail cache. “He did it ’cause we broke him first—the past, the pushers. But Celeste? Innocent light. Pray for her stars.” DA timelines target November indictments, tox refinements the scalpel. In Gloria’s tear-traced map—from belts to blood oaths— the saga swells: not just one son’s sin, but a cycle cracked open. Troubled pasts don’t absolve; they illuminate the industry’s abyss, where broken boys become blades. For Rivas, the fighter whose gasps gurgled under hands unseen, Gloria’s confession echoes a dirge—regret’s rhythm, justice’s reluctant cue.
