An LAPD criminalist testified on Thursday that samples from three objects in the former Los Angeles home of singer D4vd were overwhelmingly more likely to have originated from Celeste Rivas Hernandez than from another person. The testimony entered a preliminary hearing. It was not a verdict, and the judge had not yet decided whether the case would proceed to trial. [1]
D4vd, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke, has pleaded not guilty to charges including first-degree murder, lewd acts with a child under 14, and mutilation of human remains. Prosecutors allege that he killed the 14-year-old, whose decomposed body was found in his Tesla last year. Those are allegations being tested, not adjudicated facts. [1]
Criminalist Samantha Tosch said samples from a rowing machine, a rubber floor mat, and a Tesla charger in Burke's garage were "one septillion times more likely" if they came from Rivas Hernandez rather than anyone else in the population. The size of that likelihood ratio makes a powerful headline. It answers a laboratory comparison under stated assumptions; it does not by itself answer when material was deposited, how the objects were handled, or who committed a crime. [1]
Defense lawyers used Thursday's hearing to expose those remaining steps. Attorney Blair Berk questioned another LAPD criminalist about why investigators did not test certain items, including chainsaws found in the garage. She also established that multiple people lived at the residence, previewing a challenge to the prosecution's selection and interpretation of evidence. [1]
The hearing included a separate chain of circumstantial evidence. A highway patrol officer described a state worker finding Rivas Hernandez's passport in January on an embankment beside State Route 154 in Santa Barbara. A detective said cellular and Tesla data showed Burke traveled to the area where the passport was found. Defense questioning raised the possibility that weather could have moved the card. [1]
Each item occupies a different rung. A DNA likelihood concerns identity within a tested sample. A blood indication concerns the substance detected. Location data concern movement. A recovered passport concerns possession and disposal only after custody, timing, and alternative explanations are tested. Joining them is the prosecution's theory; deciding whether enough admissible evidence supports a trial belongs to the court.
A preliminary hearing asks a narrower question than a criminal trial. The state is presenting enough of its theory to establish probable cause, while the defense is testing omissions and alternative explanations before a jury is ever asked to decide guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Treating testimony at the first threshold as a result at the last deletes the legal work still ahead.
The distinction protects more than the accused. It also protects the public record of Rivas Hernandez's death from becoming a collection of viral fragments. Her identity, the sample statistics, the passport, and the vehicle data deserve attribution to witnesses and investigators with the limits each gave, rather than certainty supplied by repetition.
Celebrity-crime coverage often compresses that ladder because names and numbers travel faster than procedural verbs. "Probably the victim" can become "proved the killing" in an aggregation headline. The Guardian reports both the prosecution's forensic claim and the defense's scrutiny, but the hearing was expected to continue into the next week. [1]
The exact X query timed out. That leaves online reaction unobserved and authorizes no claim about fan denial, public certainty, or skepticism. The absence is in retrieval, not on the platform.
The next decisive record is the judge's bind-over ruling, followed by any admissibility litigation, complete chain-of-custody record, defense testing, and surviving charges. Until then, the evidence has been described and disputed in a preliminary forum. It has not been converted into guilt.
-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York