In a court brief filed Wednesday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Beth Silverman alleged that David Anthony Burke, who performs as D4vd, had covered up his lengthy sexual abuse of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, lured her to his Hollywood rental mansion, stabbed her and let her bleed to death, and then used “a chainsaw and perhaps other tools” to cut up her body and remove two of her fingers to destroy a tattoo linking him to her.

Burke, 21, is charged with murder, continuous sex abuse of a minor and mutilating a corpse. Prosecutors say he killed Hernandez because she threatened to expose his abuse and ruin his music career. Prosecutors say Burke bought a shovel, two chainsaws, a body bag, heavy-duty laundry bags, a “burn box”, and a blue inflatable pool as part of a scheme to dispose of her body.

“There are no words to express the indescribable pain the family is experiencing right now,” said attorney Patrick Steinfeld on behalf of the family. “They still have bills to pay and jobs they go to every day. All they want is time to grieve and heal.”

He said that informing the family of the gruesome details was the most difficult thing he’s done in his 37-year law career.

“I originally encouraged the Rivas Hernandez family to speak publicly throughout the criminal process. They agreed with the full support of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman. However, in light of the gruesome details emerging almost daily, the family has decided not to make any statements now or in the future,” he added.

Prosecutors’ nine-page brief detailed an abusive relationship between the singer and the girl that allegedly started when she was just 11 and ended with her slaying in April 2025. In the days after Hernandez’s death, Burke used an inflatable pool to contain Hernandez’s body as the singer dismembered her remains in the garage, according to a brief prosecutors prepared for Burke’s preliminary hearing, at which they will make their case to a judge that there’s enough evidence for Burke to stand trial. Bits of plastic from the pool were discovered embedded in Hernandez’s remains, the document said.

Hernandez’s badly decomposed body was found in the trunk of Burke’s Tesla at a Hollywood tow yard in September. Authorities said Hernandez was last seen at Burke’s Hollywood residence on April 23, 2025. The two got into a “lengthy argument” the night before, with Hernandez expressing jealousy over Burke’s relationships with other women and “threatened to disclose damaging information about her relationship with defendant to end his career and destroy his life,” Silverman wrote.

On the night police believe Hernandez was killed, according to the court filing, the singer ordered an Uber to bring her from her Lake Elsinore home to Hollywood around 8:40 p.m.

An autopsy report made public last week revealed Hernandez died from a pair of stab wounds. Prosecutors allege that Burke cut off two of Hernandez’s fingers to remove evidence of a tattoo Hernandez had gotten of the singer’s name.

Hernandez was reported missing by her family multiple times in Lake Elsinore in 2024. Riverside County sheriff’s investigators questioned Burke about her whereabouts in February 2024, but Burke claimed he was “unaware she was a minor or that she had been reported missing,” Silverman wrote.

Two days later, she returned home and her parents took away her cellphone. But Burke allegedly drove to Lake Elsinore and paid a junior high school student $1,000 to give her a new phone so they could stay in touch, according to the document filed Wednesday. Over the next year, Hernandez traveled with the singer to Las Vegas, Texas and London where she met “his family,” Silverman wrote.

Burke’s lead defense attorney, Blair Berk, has not responded to the new filing or returned a request for comment. She has insisted her client did not kill the teen. A preliminary hearing is tentatively scheduled for May 26.

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But Trump’s new status as a convicted felon probably won’t significantly affect his chances of winning the 2024 presidential election.

That, too is a strange historic first: a presidential candidate convicted of felonies, but suffering little if any political damage in the process.

However sensational the charges, which stemmed from hush money payments made to an adult film actress, many voters will react to the Manhattan jury’s decision with a shrug.

The conviction won’t prevent him from staying in the race until election day. If he wins, he stands a good chance of avoiding serious penalties while he’s in the White House.

It won’t be easy to spin a conviction on 34 felony counts as a victory, but there are plenty of ways Trump can mitigate the consequences.

He’ll continue to claim that the charges were flimsy and the process was rigged against him.

If he appeals the verdict, as expected, that will allow him to argue — correctly — that a conviction isn’t final while it’s under challenge. Not incidentally, it will also keep him out of jail, at least for a while.

Why do I say the guilty verdict won’t likely put much of a dent in Trump’s electoral prospects? Because that’s what the smartest political pollsters, Republicans and Democrats, say.

Democratic strategist Mark Mellman said the conviction was “unlikely to play a significant role” in the election. “It’s possible that the polls will flutter and then return to where they were. And it’s possible that there won’t be a flutter.”

Republican pollster Whit Ayres said the verdict’s impact would most likely be “negligible.”

In an ABC News/IPSOS poll last month, only 16% of Trump’s current voters said they would “reconsider” supporting him if he were convicted in the New York case. A mere 4% said they would definitely stop supporting him. But voters are often poor predictors of their own reactions, the pollsters said.

Many Democrats told pollsters in 1998 that they thought then-President Clinton should resign if he were impeached for lying about a sexual relationship with a White House intern, Mellman noted. But when the Republican-led House of Representatives actually impeached Clinton, his popularity soared.

Trump voters have proved fiercely loyal to their favored candidate, felon or not.

A month before the 2016 presidential election, when a videotape surfaced in which Trump boasted of kissing women without asking and grabbing them “by the pussy,” his poll numbers dropped by only one percentage point and rebounded quickly.

“We have seen, over eight years, a series of events that caused people to say, ‘Surely this time, Trump will lose support.’ But he never really does,” Ayres said.

Trump himself has marveled at the phenomenon. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” he said in 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”

The presumptive Republican nominee has primed his supporters to ignore a guilty verdict by relentlessly attacking the cases against him as politically motivated.

“If I were trying to design a court case that would be easy for Republicans to dismiss as a partisan witch hunt, I would design the New York case,” Ayres said, noting that Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg is not only a Democrat, but a vocal Trump critic.

Trump has also shown that constant repetition of even bogus claims can bend public opinion his way.

Case in point: his false claims, long since disproved, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. A year ago, the Monmouth University Poll found that 68% of Republicans said they believed President Biden won the election through fraud. This year, after Trump spent months denouncing the election at campaign rallies, that number has ticked up to 75%.

Despite the verdict in New York, Trump has scored an important victory in all four of his criminal cases: He and his lawyers, aided by a dose of luck, have succeeded in postponing any final reckoning until after election day.

Six months ago, any of the cases could have threatened his presidential campaign: a federal prosecution stemming from his supporters’ invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; a federal case on charges he illegally retained highly classified documents; a Georgia election interference case; and the New York business fraud case.

Trump has contrived to postpone the trials in three of those cases and will likely appeal his verdict in the fourth. The appeals process would last far beyond the election.

Those delays won’t make the charges go away.

But if Trump wins the election, once he is president he can order the Justice Department to halt the two federal cases. Some career Justice Department officials might refuse to carry out those orders, but a newly inaugurated president will presumably be able to find — or appoint — someone willing to do his bidding.

And under most legal precedent, state courts would put his prosecutions in New York and Georgia on hold while he’s in the White House. If he takes office in January and completes a full term, none of the cases would be decided before 2029, when he’ll be 82.

Being the first former president ever convicted on criminal charges is a dubious achievement, to be sure.

Equally unprecedented — and potentially more damaging to democracy — Trump has given future politicians a dangerous example: He has shown that felony convictions need not stand in the way of success.

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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA — Fifteen Southern California residents, including a California Highway Patrol employee, are accused of being part of an organized crime ring that colluded to profit from fraudulent auto insurance claims, it was announced Friday.

The Inland Empire Automobile Insurance Task Force began the investigation in November 2022 after it was learned that CHP non-sworn employee Rosa Isela Santistevan, 55, of Irvine was illegally selling crash reports that contained personal information about people involved in wrecks across Southern California, according to Friday’s announcement from the California Department of Insurance.

The conspiracy began after ringleader Andre Angelo Reyes, 36, of Corona befriended Santistevan and other CHP employees by donating to various events and parties hosted by the state agency, according to the CDI.

The cozy relationship led to Santistevan illegally selling thousands of traffic reports to Reyes, who then gave the ill-gotten information to 26-year-old Pomona resident Esmeralda Parga. Parga would contact the people named in the reports, pretending to be from their insurance company, and coordinate having their vehicles towed to an “approved” repair center, the CDI alleged.

Tow truck drivers cooperated in the scheme by taking victims’ vehicles to CA Collision, owned by Anthony Gomez, 35, of Jurupa Valley. The shop would hold the vehicles hostage and demand cash payment from the victims’ insurance companies, CDI reported.

The crime ring even intentionally caused crashes. One of those wrecks was recorded on a defendant’s phone and discovered during a search warrant service, according to the state agency.

The 15 people allegedly involved in the scheme are charged with insurance fraud, grand theft by trick, and false impersonation. The charges involve 19 fraudulent claims resulting in a $353,035 loss, CDI reported. Twelve of the 15 suspects were arrested Thursday.

According to the CDI, the defendants include:

• Andre Angelo Reyes, 36, of Corona; booked into Riverside County jail with bail set at $700,000.
• Rosa Isela Santistevan, 55, of Irvine; booked into the Orange County jail with bail set at $700,000.
• Esmeralda Parga, 26, of Pomona; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $700,000.
• Anthony Gomez, 35, of Jurupa Valley; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $700,000.
• Ezequiel Baltazar Orozco, 30, of Los Angeles; charged but not yet in custody.
• Antonio Terrazas Perez Jr., 19, of Los Angeles; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $150,000.
• Erika Garcia, 31, of Los Angeles; charged but not yet in custody.
• Israel Avila Sandoval, 45, of Pomona; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $150,000.
• Luis Alberto Ramirez Jr., 32, of San Bernardino; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $100,000.
• Robert Arzac, 49, of West Covina; booked into the Orange County jail with bail set at $50,000.
• Antonio Ramirez Perez, 44, of Los Angeles; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $350,000.
• Brian Anthony Lopez, 25, of Anaheim (no booking information available
• Emily Marie Boatman, 26, of Ontario; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $700,000.
• Ricardo Parga Jr., 23, of Pomona; booked into San Bernardino County jail with bail set at $50,000.
• Steven Anthony Alfaro, 38, of Buena Park; charged but not yet in custody.

The Inland Empire Automobile Insurance Task Force includes the California Department of Insurance, California Highway Patrol, San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, and the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office.

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RIVERSIDE, CA — An unlicensed driver who backed into a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer during a traffic stop, injuring the lawman, pleaded guilty Monday to assault on a peace officer with a deadly weapon and other charges.

Prudencio Xajil Alvarado, 57, admitted the assault count, along with DUI resulting in great bodily injury and being an unlicensed operator of a motor vehicle, as part of a plea directly to Riverside County Superior Court Judge Thomas Kelly, without input or objection from the District Attorney’s Office.

Kelly did not specify a potential term of imprisonment. He scheduled Alvarado’s sentencing for July 10 at the Riverside Hall of Justice.

The defendant remains free on $35,000 bail.

According to CHP Officer Javier Navarro, about 9:30 a.m. Oct. 18, 2022, the victim, identified only as a motor officer from the agency’s Riverside office, spotted the defendant’s Nissan Maxima on Indiana Avenue, just south of the Riverside (91) Freeway, and observed an unspecified infraction, prompting the lawman to conduct an enforcement stop.

Alvarado complied, pulling over to the curb, and the motor unit stopped a short distance behind him, Navarro said.

“As the officer began to dismount his motorcycle to contact the driver, Alvarado placed the Nissan into reverse and accelerated toward the officer,” the CHP spokesman said. “The Nissan collided into the motorcycle, disabling it and subsequently causing minor injuries to the officer.”

The lawman immediately arrested the defendant without further incident.

“Alvarado displayed objective signs and symptoms of alcohol intoxication,” Navarro said.

The officer was treated for his injuries but not hospitalized. The defendant was not hurt.

Alvarado has no documented prior felony or misdemeanor convictions in Riverside County.

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