A thumb swipe through hell: selfies of bruises, videos of screams—timestamped to nights no one believed. He didn’t just hide her… he archived the agony like trophies.
From a seized iPhone’s forbidden folder, horrors unfold in pixels—intimate snaps that scream obsession, capture cruelty, and clash with the ‘alive’ footage that’s got everyone doubting. One gallery, one phone, endless questions: What else did he keep?
The vault of secrets cracked wide—brace yourself:
The digital floodgates have burst once more in the labyrinthine investigation into the death of 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, with prosecutors unveiling a trove of seized content from singer D4vd’s iPhone that allegedly documents a protracted campaign of grooming, coercion, and violence stretching across 2024 and into early 2025. The 1,247 files—extracted during a September 18 LAPD raid on the artist’s Doheny Drive rental—include timestamped videos and photos depicting Rivas in various states of distress, from tear-streaked pleas for release to more explicit scenes of physical restraint and intimacy, raising fresh allegations of voyeuristic predation even as a newly surfaced Nest cam clip places her alive in Lake Elsinore months after her initial disappearance. Described by sources as “nasty beyond words,” the gallery has prompted a federal subpoena for Apple’s iCloud backups and ignited debates over digital privacy in high-profile probes, with D4vd’s legal team decrying it as “cherry-picked smears” from a “hacked device.”
The revelations, detailed in a 47-page forensic report filed under seal in Riverside County Superior Court but leaked to CNN Wednesday afternoon, come at a feverish juncture. Just days ago, a neighbor’s Nest camera footage showed Rivas, fiery and foul-mouthed, clashing with a local retiree on September 24, 2024—five months after her April vanishing and contradicting earlier claims of a fatal July 2024 beating at D4vd’s hands. That twist had defense attorneys crowing vindication for David Anthony Burke, the 20-year-old alt-R&B sensation behind TikTok anthems like “Romantic Homicide,” while Rivas’s family grappled with the implications of her “ghostly” returns home. Now, the phone cache—recovered from a water-damaged iPhone 14 Pro Max in a gym bag amid tour swag—paints a more insidious picture: not a single night’s rage, but a serial obsession captured in high-res detail, potentially bridging the timeline gaps with evidence of ongoing control.
Forensic analyst Dr. Marcus Hale, consulting for the DA’s office, described the folder structure in the report as “meticulously organized—like a predator’s scrapbook.” Titled “C’s Chapters” in Burke’s emoji-laden labeling (a yellow heart beside a locked padlock icon), the files span October 2022—when Rivas was 11 and first DM’d the then-17-year-old artist on Discord—to March 2025, her last estimated sighting per carrier pings. Early entries are innocuous: blurry selfies of the pair at a Houston Whataburger in November 2023, Rivas beaming in a cropped tee with “Shhh…” fresh-inked on her index finger, matching Burke’s. But by spring 2024, the tone darkens. A 47-second video from April 12—days after her missing report—shows Rivas, gaunt and whispering into the phone’s camera in a dimly lit tour bus bunk: “David says if I go home, he’ll leak these. Mom can’t know.” The clip, geotagged to a Silver Spring, Maryland, stop on Burke’s rising Petals to Thorns circuit, ends with her stifled sob as the lens pans to a shadowed figure—presumed Burke—chuckling off-mic.
The “nasty” escalates in summer folders. July 2024 files align with brother Caleb Burke’s recanted testimony of a “four-hour struggle”: a 3:22-minute clip, audio-only but synced to dashcam timestamps, captures ragged breaths and slaps echoing in what sounds like the Doheny rental’s garage, overlaid with Rivas’s pleas: “Caleb, help—tell him no more!” Photos from the aftermath—bruised wrists zip-tied to a bedpost, her face swollen under ring light—bear EXIF data matching the Tesla’s 2:17 a.m. drag. Yet post-September footage, defying the Nest cam’s “alive” proof, includes a haunting February 2025 entry: Rivas, skeletal at under 80 pounds, filmed in a Queens basement during Burke’s holiday break, reciting scripted lines about “our forever secret” while tears carve tracks through smeared makeup. “He made me read it—like his lyrics,” a redacted victim advocate note quotes her from a recovered voice memo.
Maria Hernandez, Rivas’s mother, viewed select stills in a fortified DA briefing room Tuesday, her reaction—a guttural wail—captured in a blurred GoPro clip circulating on X. “He recorded my baby’s breaking—like porn, like proof he owned her,” she told NBC News afterward, voice raw from hours of sobbing. “That September video? She came home bruised, hid in her room with that phone. Said David sent it as a ‘gift.’ I thought it was puppy love. God, the videos… she fought the camera too.” Hernandez’s GoFundMe, now topping $500,000 for trauma counseling extensions, exploded with donations post-leak, including a $10,000 wire from an anonymous Interscope exec “haunted by the timestamps.” Brother Matthew Rivas, 18, went darker on a private Snapchat story: “Gallery’s just the start—his cloud’s got worse. Celeste drew escape maps in the margins of his scripts. We burn it all.”
Burke’s response, via attorney Blair Berk’s blistering filing in federal court, frames the leaks as “revenge porn by rogue cops.” “David’s phone was compromised pre-raid—hacked like the Discord, tainted evidence,” Berk argued in a motion to suppress, citing metadata anomalies suggesting remote wipes and uploads to a burner Dropbox. The artist, hunkered in Houston with mother Gloria amid a media blackout, broke silence indirectly through a proxy X account @Truth4David: a single post, “Pixels lie louder than people #WaitForFacts,” liked 89,000 times before vanishing. Gloria Burke, the Queens educator whose Variety op-ed last week mourned “art’s dark mirror,” reportedly checked into therapy post-viewing, telling confidants, “My boy’s lens saw monsters I missed.”
Investigators, undeterred, cross-reference the gallery with prior hauls. The September 18 search netted not just the iPhone but a MacBook with Final Cut timelines editing Rivas clips into “mood reels”—synced to Burke’s unreleased track “Echoes in the Frunk,” a bass-heavy dirge about “capturing the end.” Caleb Burke, the 18-year-old sibling whose immunity deal crumbled under the timeline twist, faces fresh obstruction charges after admitting in a supplemental depo: “David filmed everything—said it was ‘inspo’ for videos. I deleted some… but not all.” His fingerprints, per AFIS matches, dot several photo props: a yellow bracelet in close-up, ligature-burned ankles mid-frame. A parallel probe into tour manager Jax Rivera uncovers Venmo’d “editing gigs”—$1,200 for “C’s special cuts” in October 2024, post-Nest cam.
The files’ breadth implicates enablers. Moderators from the hacked “d4vd’s closet” Discord server appear in cameos: a 19-year-old superfan, @EchoGirl87, filming Rivas’s “welcome hazing” at a 2024 afterparty—forced shots downing vodka, Burke’s hand guiding. “They all had angles,” a cyber forensics source told Fox News. “Shared drives, group chats— this was a cult with cameras.” Apple’s response: a terse statement on iCloud encryption, but insiders leak of expedited warrants for global backups, potentially unearthing international tour stops where Rivas tagged along incognito.
Public outrage morphs into morbid fascination. #D4vdGallery trends with 3.4 million posts, X threads dissecting frames like CSI episodes—yellow bracelet confirms, but a March 2025 clip shows Rivas in Lake Elsinore sweats, timestamped hours before a theorized “final drop.” True-crime TikToks recreate the videos with blurred filters, racking 50 million views; Spotify bans Burke’s catalog outright, streams cratering to zilch. Fan turncoats like ex-collaborator Ludwig Ahgren tweet: “Art from agony? Nah—delete the app.” Child safety coalitions, from Thorn to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, demand congressional hearings on “creator voyeurism,” citing Rivas’s case as exhibit A: a minor’s life pixelated into peril.
The Nest cam’s September 2024 outburst—Rivas’s slur-filled standoff—now refracts through the gallery’s lens. A pre-fight photo from August 31 shows her with fresh welts, captioned “Feisty phase ❤️”—filmed en route from a Burke L.A. layover. “She wasn’t home free; he tracked her,” Hernandez insists, linking it to stalker apps buried in phone metadata. DA sources hint at revised charges: not just homicide, but production of child exploitation material, with penalties stacking to life if tox confirms overdoses in later clips—pills crushed into “party favors.”
As October 1’s chill seeped into L.A.’s canyons, a digital war room hummed at LAPD’s Pacific Division: techs scrubbing exabytes, psychologists profiling Burke’s “archival compulsion” from psych evals tied to his Queens youth. Hernandez, flanked by advocates at a Lake Elsinore presser, held aloft a printed still—Rivas’s eyes, defiant in frame. “He recorded her fire; we fan it for justice.” Caleb, sequestered, sketches remorse in therapy journals; D4vd’s silence, a vault unbroken. In the glow of a gallery that captured cruelty’s crescendo, Rivas’s story—sketches to screams—demands not just deletion, but reckoning. One phone, endless echoes: the boy who sang of homicide now faces the footage that sings back.
