The Missing Runaway, the Viral Singer, and the Tesla Trunk in the D4vd Saga

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.

Rivas Hernandez’s remains were found in D4vd’s Tesla while he was on tour in support of his debut album. As his upcoming shows were nixed and Crocs and Hollister cut him from a joint brand campaign, D4vd quickly became a durable fixation in the finicky online pop culture spaces from which he sprung. The 24-year-old hip-hop streamer Adin Ross, among the class of new media personalities whom Donald Trump courted during his 2024 campaign, vowed on Monday night to have a former bodyguard of D4vd’s arrested for complicity in what he took as a given to be D4vd’s exploitation of a minor. (D4vd’s manager didn’t immediately return a request for comment.)

“I think it’s almost a little bit too suspicious,” the British YouTube hip-hop documentarian Trap Lore Ross tells me.

Ross has emerged at the fore of a crowded online field in recent years as a dogged chronicler of the real-life dramas surrounding rappers and gang violence. When this ecosystem trained itself on D4vd’s music and personal history this month, Ross sprung into action, releasing a two-hour analysis titled, “D4VD Hid Clues About Murder in Every Song,” and a continuing string of shorter follow-ups.

FaceTiming from a recording studio in Los Angeles, Ross rattles off the questions he still has. Could prosecutors prove a potential case if D4vd was on tour when the body was found? Would D4vd keep releasing music? He runs through a list of conspiracy theories surrounding the death, offering his read on their relative merits. Above all, he is absorbed and planning another deep dive.

“It really does feel darker than anything I’ve ever covered before,” Ross says.

Interscope Records suspended all promotion of D4vd on Friday, and collaborators and institutional backers have begun distancing themselves. But as Ross points out, “What’s really crazy is this guy’s just chilling. He’s at home playing Fortnite right now.” By Tuesday, as documented across the social media pages dissecting D4vd’s music for hints, his Spotify streams were surging.