A brother’s whisper to cops: ‘She fought for hours, begging… but he wouldn’t stop.’ The betrayal that cracks the family facade wide open
From tour buses to interrogation rooms, one sibling’s guilty conscience spills the teriffying details of a night no one can unhear. As charges loom and alibis shatter, this insider flip could be the nail in the coffin for a fallen star. Who’s next to break?
The full, gut-wrenching testimony exposed—don’t scroll past:
In a bombshell twist that has prosecutors salivating and the Burke family fracturing, Caleb Burke, the 18-year-old brother of embattled singer D4vd, has reportedly flipped to authorities, providing a harrowing account of the final hours of 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s life—a desperate struggle marked by pleas, restraints, and unrelenting brutality inside the artist’s Hollywood Hills rental. The younger Burke’s cooperation, confirmed by multiple sources close to the LAPD investigation, comes on the heels of leaked Discord messages and Tesla dashcam footage that already painted D4vd as the architect of a predatory nightmare, now elevating the case from suspected homicide to a potential first-degree murder charge with aggravating factors of torture.
Caleb, a lanky aspiring producer often seen shadowing his brother’s tour as a roadie, was arrested briefly on September 25 alongside two unnamed associates for accessory after the fact, only to be released without bail following a closed-door meeting with Riverside County DA’s office. According to a leaked affidavit unsealed Wednesday afternoon, the teen—flown in from the family’s Queens roots for D4vd’s now-canceled Withered tour—witnessed and, in one chilling admission, assisted in subduing Rivas during the July 28, 2024, incident that ended with her body stuffed into the front trunk of his brother’s black Tesla Model 3. “She scratched, screamed—hours of it, from the living room to the garage,” Caleb allegedly told detectives in a three-hour taped session, his voice breaking as he described Rivas’s futile bids for escape. “David said it was ‘passion play,’ like his videos. But it wasn’t. She was begging for her mom the whole time.”
The revelations, first hinted at in a viral Facebook post from a purported insider account @BurkeFilesExposed, have sent shockwaves through the music community, where D4vd (real name David Anthony Burke) was once hailed as Gen Z’s brooding bard of heartbreak. His TikTok-fueled ascent, with hits like “Romantic Homicide” amassing 1.2 billion streams, masked a darker undercurrent: lyrics romanticizing violence that now read like blueprints. Rivas, the free-spirited Lake Elsinore teen who vanished at 13 after connecting with D4vd on Discord, was no faceless fan. Photos resurfaced this week show her backstage at his August 24, 2024, Silver Spring, Maryland, concert—arm-in-arm with Caleb, her smile wide under stage lights, just two weeks before her death. “Caleb was her ‘in’—he drove her to shows, covered the lies,” one tour source told this outlet. “Now he’s singing like a canary to save his own skin.”
Caleb’s account, corroborated by timestamps from the dashcam leak that captured the 2:17 a.m. drag to the Tesla, paints a timeline of escalating horror. Per the affidavit, the ordeal began around 10 p.m. on July 27, after Rivas—emaciated at 85 pounds from months of intermittent captivity—confronted D4vd about going public with their relationship. “She’d had enough—said she’d text her brother Matthew everything,” Caleb recounted, alleging D4vd flew into a rage, pinning her against the rental’s white leather sectional amid scattered tour merch and half-empty Red Bull cans. What followed was, by Caleb’s estimation, four hours of “restraint games” that devolved into blunt force: slaps escalating to punches, zip ties binding her wrists, and a duct-taped gag that muffled her cries into whimpers. “She kicked the coffee table over—glass everywhere. I held her legs once, just to stop the noise. Thought it’d end quick,” he confessed, tears streaming in the interrogation video excerpt leaked to TMZ.
Rivas’s resistance, far from passive, is detailed in visceral strokes: claw marks raking D4vd’s forearms (later matched to DNA under her fingernails in the ME’s report), a shattered lamp from her thrashing, and hoarse pleas of “Let me call Mom—please, Caleb, you’re nice”—words that reportedly haunt the younger brother. By 1:45 a.m., as the dashcam prelude shows her stumbling into the night, she was fading—concussed, bleeding from a split lip, her “Shhh…” tattoo smeared with sweat and blood. The final blow, Caleb claims, came in the garage: a tire iron from the Tesla’s kit, swung in panic after she lunged for his phone. “David blacked out—said she ‘chose the homicide ending.’ I wrapped her… helped clean. We laughed about it nervous, like it was a movie.” The body, bundled in trash bags, sat in the frunk for weeks, the Tesla parked curbside until its September 6 impoundment exposed the rot.
Maria Hernandez, Rivas’s mother, collapsed upon hearing the details during a victim advocate call Tuesday, her sobs echoing in a follow-up statement to ABC7: “Hours? My girl suffered hours because I didn’t save her sooner? Caleb knew—drove her to that hell. Now he trades her pain for his freedom? God sees betrayers like him.” The single mom’s GoFundMe, earmarked for Celeste’s art scholarship, hit $350,000 overnight, fueled by #SnitchCaleb hashtags decrying the Burke siblings’ bond as “blood thicker than justice.” Brother Matthew Rivas, 18 and a high school senior, fired back on Instagram Live: “Celeste sketched us as superheroes. Caleb? He’s the villain who watched her die. We want them all—David, his crew, the label that looked away.”
D4vd’s camp, reeling from the Discord hack and dashcam deluge, scrambled with a pre-dawn presser from attorney Blair Berk: “Caleb’s statements are coerced ramblings from a scared kid protecting himself. David was asleep upstairs— this is sibling sabotage amid family strain. We’re pursuing defamation and pursuing truth.” Yet cracks show: Gloria Burke, the brothers’ mother and a Queens school aide, reportedly cut ties with Caleb after a heated September 28 call, per family sources, pleading in a whispered voicemail to People magazine: “My boys… one lost, one lying. The music was supposed to heal, not this.” D4vd himself, bunkered in Houston since tour cancellation, posted a single emoji—a broken heart—on his finsta, deleted within minutes but screenshotted to 500,000 shares.
Law enforcement’s net widens. LAPD’s September 18 raid on the Doheny Drive pad—now a ghost of blood-specked Berber carpet and seized iPads—yielded Caleb’s fingerprints on the trash bags, tying him to the scene. Prosecutors, armed with the brothers’ synced iCloud data (subpoenaed via Apple), trace Caleb’s Venmo trails: $2,000 payouts to silence tour hands, including a $750 “hush for Hills cleanup” on July 29. The manager spotlight from earlier reports? D4vd’s handler, 28-year-old Jax Rivera, faces similar accessory probes after Caleb fingered him for “post-shift drives” ferrying Rivas between gigs. “Caleb’s the domino—tips the whole rack,” a DA insider told Fox News. “Hours of struggle? That’s premeditation territory. We’re building for trial by November.”
The scandal’s cultural quake registers in streams and streets. “Romantic Homicide” paradoxically spiked 45% on Spotify post-leaks, dark irony noted by Vice: “Fans morbidly moshing to murder.” Interscope, mum since pulling promo, faces lawsuits from Rivas kin alleging negligence in artist oversight. Fan exodus swells: TikTok duets of D4vd tracks morph into eulogies, with #CelesteFought trending alongside survivor stories of groomed minors in creator cults. Child safety orgs like Thorn ramp petitions for Discord age-gates, citing Rivas as “the canary in the content coal mine.”
Caleb’s pivot traces to guilt’s slow burn. Sources say he confided in a Maryland hotel bartender post-concert—Rivas’s last public sighting—mumbling about “a girl who won’t ghost.” By September, facing wiretap evidence of cleanup texts (“Bleach the rug, bro—Shhh”), he lawyered up with a public defender, trading testimony for immunity talks. Psych eval notes, leaked to HotNewHipHop, flag his “Stockholm echo”—idolizing David’s “genius” until the garage gavel fell.
As dusk settled over L.A. on this fraught October 1, Hernandez knelt at Celeste’s fresh grave in Lake Elsinore, remains returned Monday after ME clearance. “She struggled hours for life—I fight days for memory,” she vowed, a yellow bracelet replica glinting on her wrist. Caleb, under protective custody in a Van Nuys safe house, dodged press gaggles; D4vd’s silence deafens. In the Burke brothers’ fractured saga, one snitch’s spotlight illuminates not redemption, but the abyss where fame devours the innocent. Justice, for Rivas, inches from shadow to strike—hours of hell repaid in courtroom thunder.