D4vd: They Told Him the Missing Girl Was 13 — What He Did Next

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
A 14-year-old girl had a man's name tattooed on her ring finger. Not a friendship bracelet, not a note in a locker, a permanent tattoo.
David and the shh.
She traveled with him to Las Vegas, London and Texas. She spent weekends at his Hollywood Hills home. She was in seventh grade when the relationship allegedly started. And every adult in her orbit, her parents, two sheriff's departments and an entire music industry that surrounded this glob of rejected human DNA known as David Burke, had at least a piece of this in front of them.
Not one of them did a damn thing.
Her name was Celeste Rivas Hernandez.
The man, according to prosecutors, was David Burke, a platinum selling recording artist who goes by David. Their filing says they made contact originally back in January 2022 She was 11
He was 17, prosecutors allege, and the legal relationship began in November 2023, when she was 13 and he was 18 Over the following year, she spent what prosecutors ascribe as significant time with him. Summer weekends at his rental in the Hollywood Hills, Las Vegas, London, Texas, where she met his family and she's a child.
This is a three-part series about every person, in every system that had a chance to stop it and did it. I'd love to get your thoughts in the comment section as we work our way through, where we are at in the David case and how we got here. Celeste was reported missing from her Lake Elsinore home by three separate, three separate times in early 2024, February 15th, March 19th and April 5th. Three reports filed with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. Three times she vanished, three times she came back, three times the system marked it resolved and then just moved on. But it was the first report, February, that could have changed everything, because after that report, law enforcement had every piece of information they needed. They just didn't use any of it. Deputies pulled Celeste's phone records and found Burke's number. They called him on February 17th. He had said he'd last spoken with her a few days earlier. He had said he had no idea she was a minor. No idea. No clue. No idea. The same day, Riverside County requested a welfare check at Burke's West Hollywood home through LA. County. Deputies knocked on his door. Burke showed up. Showed him a yearbook photo of Celeste stored on his phone. Told them he'd only met her once on November 23 Deputies informed him to his face that this girl was 13 years old in a runaway. Then they left. That's it. They left. No investigation opened. No follow-up visit. No attempt to verify a single word. He said nobody ran his name. Nobody googled it, which would have shown them in about four seconds if they were talking to a signed recording artist with millions of followers. Hell, you might even find her in a photo or two on social media with him. An adult man had a 13 year old runaway school photo saved on his phone, lying to their faces about the relationship and two sheriff's departments reading it like, that's a noise complaint, just keep it down. Alright, you got it, you got it guys, have a good one. That is the moment, if one deputy asks one question, why does this guy have a seventh grader's yearbook photo on his phone? It's not his daughter or related to him like this, okay.
If one deputy just asks that question, we're not here talking about it now. Celeste came home two days later, her parents took her phone, she was reported missing again, March 19th and again on April 5th, three times in under two months. A 13-year-old girl vanishing repeatedly is not a closed case, it's a siren. And deputies already had the name, the number, and the home address of the adult on the other end of her phone records. They'd been inside his home, they'd told him her age and nothing happened. According to prosecutors, after the first report, Burke drove to Lake Elsinore and paid one of Celeste's junior high classmates a thousand bucks to hand her a new phone that he'd bought for her. A thousand dollars just to give her, he gives a thousand bucks to a child in her class. So he could keep talking to a 13-year-old whose parents had just cut off contact. That's some clever encrypted workaround. He allegedly drove to her town, found a kid in her school and handed over cash, and it worked. The line reopened immediately.
What followed was a full year of access at nobody question. Prosecutors say Celeste spent weekends at Burke's Hollywood Hill home through 2024 She went to Vegas, she went to London, she went to Texas where she met his family. Think about what it takes. Somebody booked those flights, somebody checked into those hotels. A 13 year old girl was walking through airports, sitting in ride chairs, sleeping in a grown man's home for days at a time. Not a single person in that chain, not the TSA, not a hotel at a front desk, not a car rental counter, flagged anything. The commercial infrastructure that moves people across borders had this child passing through it regularly and did not blink. And this wasn't a nobody. This was a signed artist with a label behind him, a touring operation, a management team, social media headliners and entourage. There were people around David Burke whose literal job was to manage his schedule and his image. A 13 year old girl was a regular presence in his life. And either the people whose business it was to know everything about his business didn't know or they knew and said nothing. Neither answer is acceptable.