Celeste always drew her e’s like little waves.

Her notebooks were full of them—math problems on one side of the page, dreams written on the other. Move to L.A. Get better at eyeliner. Learn how to cook something that isn’t ramen. Sometimes, tucked in the margins, she wrote names and dates and song lyrics she’d heard on TikTok.

Her real name was Celeste Rivas Hernández, but almost everyone at Lakeland Village Middle School just called her Cel. She was small for fourteen, barely 5’2, with a cloud of dark wavy hair and a shy smile that turned huge when she laughed. The teachers liked her. So did the kids. She was the quiet girl who could help you with your homework and also show you the best way to draw Hello Kitty.

Home, though, was… complicated.

Their apartment in Lake Elsinore had thin walls and a tired couch. Her mom worked a lot. Her dad wasn’t always around. Arguments flared, then fizzled. The air felt thick most nights. Celeste loved them—there was no doubt about that—but she also felt like the walls were slowly closing in.

“Sometimes they’re just mean,” she had once told her ex-boyfriend Damian, kicking a rock in the dirt behind the P.E. field. “I don’t like being there.”

He’d looked at her, trying to read how serious she was.

“You’re not really gonna run away,” he’d said, half-laughing.

She’d bumped his shoulder. “Maybe I am,” she’d joked back.

But the next day, her seat in homeroom was empty.

The first time Celeste “went missing,” she came back.

Deputies brought her home after finding her in Los Angeles. Her teacher remembered seeing her walk into class weeks later, a little thinner, a little quieter, but still Celeste, still drawing those wave-shaped e’s in her notebook.

She told bits and pieces to friends.

“I met this rapper online,” she said once, leaning in close during lunch. “He lives in L.A. He’s actually famous. Not like just TikTok famous. Real famous.”

Her friend’s eyes went wide.

“How old is he?” someone asked.

“Older,” she said, and shrugged. “But it’s fine.”

She pulled out her phone and showed a photo—the side of a boy’s face, curls falling over his eyes, a hoodie pulled tight. His username was there, clear as day: David, spelled D4VD.

“You’re lying,” one girl breathed. “That’s the guy from that one song. The one that’s all over TikTok.”

Celeste smiled, a little smug, a little nervous.

“I told you,” she said. “He’s my boyfriend.”

She said it like a spell, like if she said it enough, it would become safe and normal and not something that could blow her life apart.

By 2024, the police knew Celeste’s name.

Her family had called them more than once: she’s gone again, she hasn’t come home, we think she’s with him.

Reports were filed: runaway juvenile.

Feb 14.

March 19.

April 5.

A liquor store owner saw her on one of those days—video footage showed her walking past the bus stop, crossing the street, and getting into a car just out of frame. Her family and a friend of her mom came in looking for her. They rewound and hit play again and again.

“That’s her,” they said.

Deputies went to the house at least eleven times over thirteen months. Once, a neighbor said, they brought her back in a patrol car. Another time, she left a letter behind before she vanished, a note her mom kept folded somewhere only she knew.

At school, Damian remembered the last time he saw her clearly.

They were at P.E., the sun too bright, kids laughing and yelling around them.

“She told me she was running away,” he later told a reporter. “She was joking. Laughing. It didn’t feel real. Then the next day, she wasn’t at school. And that was it.”

She was thirteen when her family last reported her missing.

Fourteen when the police found her.

Hollywood in late summer smells like hot asphalt and bougainvillea.

On Bluebird Avenue—one of those tight streets in the Hollywood Hills where every house has a gate and a camera—you could see the city spread out below like a bowl of lights.

On August 26, 2025, someone living on that street noticed a Tesla they didn’t recognize.

White. Dented. Texas plates.

At first, no one thought much of it. Cars came and went—this was L.A.

But after a few days, it was still there. Unmoving.

Someone called parking enforcement.

On August 27, an officer came by, crouched down, and drew a chalk line across one tire. A little white slash.

Come back later, see if it moved.

On September 3, the same officer returned.

The chalk mark was in the same place.

He wrote a citation, snapped a photo. The Tesla’s white body was filmed over with dust, like it had been sitting still for weeks. The camera picked up the dent, the license plate, the angle of the curb.

On September 5, the car was towed.

Hollywood tow yard. A sea of forgotten vehicles.

The Tesla sat there quietly, in the late-summer heat, for three more days.

On September 8, one of the workers noticed a smell.

Not the usual mix of oil and rubber.

Something thicker. Sweeter. Wrong.

He followed it to the Tesla.

Called LAPD.

The two patrol officers who answered the call would later say they’d never forget the moment the frunk lifted.

The hood popped with a soft mechanical sigh, the way Teslas do, a little too quiet for what was underneath.

Inside, wrapped tightly in plastic, was a body.

Small.

Still.

Unrecognizable.

For the medical examiner, it was the kind of case that left more questions than answers.

Female.

Young, but how young?

Severely decomposed.

Weight: ~71 pounds.

Height: ~5’2″.

Dark, wavy hair.

Clothing: tube top, black leggings, simple jewelry.

There were no intact fingerprints. No face to recognize. No wallet. No ID.

So they started the hard way.

Dental records.

DNA.

Missing persons reports.

Possibilities, then eliminations.

One by one, until there was only one name left that fit:

Celeste Rivas Hernández.

Fourteen years old.

Born September 7, 2010.

Found on September 8, 2025—one day after what would have been her fifteenth birthday.

She never lived to see it.

The Tesla belonged to David Burke.

Online, most people knew him as D4VD—the kid who made songs in his sister’s closet, the voice behind melancholic TikTok hits like “Here With Me” and “Romantic Homicide.”

To his fans, he was a soft-spoken, slightly awkward 20-year-old with anime hair and a tendency to look down when he talked. To Interscope Records, he was a rising star. He’d opened for SZA. He’d played Coachella. His songs had hundreds of millions of streams.

To Celeste, if what her friends and family say is true, he was something else entirely.

Her boyfriend.

Her secret.

Her undoing.

Police confirmed the Tesla was registered to him. At the time Celeste was found, he was on tour, somewhere between airports and soundchecks, his life lived out of hotel rooms and backstage halls.

A spokesperson from his team said he was “cooperating with authorities.”

He hired a very expensive lawyer.

He did not speak publicly.

If you spent any time on the internet that week, you could watch the rumor storm in real time.

Day 1: “Body found in singer’s Tesla.”
Day 2: “Body is a 14-year-old girl.”
Day 3: “Her name is Celeste, and she’s from Lake Elsinore.”

Discord chats leaked.

TikTok comments resurfaced.

A Reddit user claimed their sister, a ninth grader, had whispered months earlier about a famous rapper dating an eighth grader named C from Lake Elsinore, paying friends to keep quiet.

People remembered a comment, written long before Celeste was identified: “Waiting for LAPD to get your ass for messing with a 13-year-old.”

A teacher from her middle school recorded a video, his voice tight, telling his class:

“She met this guy on social media. He came and got her. She ran away. The cops found her in Hollywood and brought her back. Now she’s gone.”

Her ex, Damian, sat in front of a camera, eyes shiny.

“She said she was going to see her boyfriend, David,” he said. “I didn’t think it was real. When I saw the news about the body in his car, I just… I knew.”

Nothing had been proven in court.

Police had not named David a suspect or even a person of interest publicly.

But online, the court of public opinion was already in session.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a quiet office in Los Angeles, detectives stared at a screen filled with Tesla logs.

Door opens. Door closes.

Key card used.

Frunk opened.

Frunk closed.

GPS points trailing across a city map like breadcrumbs.

Teslas are computers on wheels. They remember more than most people realize. Each trip, each unlock, each time someone taps open trunk in an app.

Whether that data would lead to a single name or a web of them, no one outside the investigation yet knew.

But one thing was clear:

Celeste did not wrap herself in plastic and fold into a frunk.

Someone put her there.

Someone chose a quiet hill, parked, and walked away.

Someone left her to rot in the dark while the world kept listening to songs.

While strangers on Reddit pulled up screenshots and old livestreams, while fans debated in comment sections about whether artists’ lyrics could be used as evidence, a small group of people in Lake Elsinore grieved a girl they remembered for things that had nothing to do with fame or horror.

At a candlelight vigil in September, classmates and neighbors gathered with candles and posters. Someone had printed a photo of Celeste from picture day—hair pulled back, eyes bright, wearing a simple necklace.

“She was funny,” one girl said, voice shaking. “She liked my stupid drawings.”

“She was really smart,” another added. “She helped me study for math when I was failing. I wouldn’t have passed if it wasn’t for her.”

Her brother Matthew stood off to the side, hands in his pockets, staring at the ground. People had messaged him on social media, asking questions he wasn’t ready to answer. They wanted to know how much he knew, how long he’d known, whether he’d warned anyone.

Online, his alleged DMs were being shared like exhibits in a trial. Offline, he was just a young man trying to reconcile the fact that his little sister had ended up hidden in a stranger’s car hundreds of miles away.

Her mother didn’t speak at the vigil.

She just held a candle and wept.

The police remained tight-lipped.

No cause of death released. No toxicology report made public. No timeline confirmed for when exactly Celeste died.

They called it a death investigation.

Not a homicide.

Not yet.

Behind the scenes, that might have been different. One LAPD chief, when asked about David and Celeste’s alleged relationship, made a small verbal slip:

“Whenever you investigate a homicide,” he began.

He didn’t finish that sentence.

It was enough to send another tremor through the internet.

People searched for meaning everywhere.

In David’s lyrics.

“In the back of my mind, I killed you and I didn’t even regret it…”

In his unreleased demos.

“Oh Celeste, the girl with my name tattooed on her chest…”

In his alter ego, Itami—the blindfolded figure in a bloody white shirt who dragged bodies and shoved people into trunks in music videos.

In Discord messages from 2022 where his fans joked about him ending up on “the Epstein list” and he laughed, then begged mods to delete the stream.

In a photo of someone holding a Hello Kitty keychain clipped to a guy’s waistband, the words “BF’s kitty” written over it.

In the small red “shhh” tattoo on Celeste’s finger, matching his.

Maybe, they said, it was all prophetic.

Maybe it was a blueprint.

Maybe it was nothing but coincidence, the eerie alignment of art and life that happens more often than people like to think.

Maybe.

But even if every lyric and every video frame was just fiction, there was still one grim, stubborn, undeniable fact:

A fourteen-year-old girl was dead in the trunk of his car.

The people who loved Celeste didn’t care about Discord logs or streaming numbers.

They cared about a life that ended in a way no one deserves.

Her brother told a reporter that their family had put up flyers. Gone door to door. Posted on Facebook and Instagram. Gone to local stores asking to see camera footage. He said he’d even gone to the police about the older guy she was seeing, but nothing happened. No charges. No rescue.

Her mom said she’d heard the name “David” more than once, spoken in the way teenage girls talk about crushes and secret boyfriends and the kinds of promises that always sound too big to be real.

The teacher who recognized her in grainy videos spoke about the danger of social media to his students, his voice tight with frustration and regret.

“I told them,” he said. “You do not know who you’re talking to online. You think you do. But you don’t.”

Sometime in late September, the L.A. County Medical Examiner released Celeste’s body to her family.

Cause of death: deferred.

Manner of death: pending.

No mention of pregnancy.

No final answers.

A private funeral was held in October. A small group of people gathered to say goodbye, while strangers on the internet argued over screenshots and song lyrics.

Somewhere in Texas, according to property records, David transferred deeds to his homes into his mother’s name.

Somewhere in an unpublicized room, detectives and prosecutors weighed data against risk. They knew the world was watching. They knew they’d get one clean chance in court if they chose to file charges.

Online, justice felt slow. Too slow.

Offline, the gap between grief and law was its usual, brutal length.

Celeste’s story isn’t finished.

There’s no trial transcript to read. No sentencing date to circle on a calendar. No headline that says “ARREST MADE” in big, bold letters.

There is only:

A girl who loved Hello Kitty and drew her e’s like waves.
A family trying to piece together how every warning sign could have been ignored.
A community asking why it took finding her in a Tesla frunk for the world to say her name.

And a lingering, heavy truth:

She didn’t get here alone.

Someone helped.

Someone knows.

Until that someone faces a courtroom instead of a comment section, until the cause and manner of death slip out of “pending” and into print, the case of Celeste Rivas Hernández sits in that horrible in-between:

Not forgotten.

Not resolved.

A story still waiting for the part where someone finally answers for what they did to a fourteen-year-old girl who never got the chance to grow up.