They Made D4vd a Star. Now They Want Him Convicted of Murder

Safiyya was sound asleep at her parents’ apartment when the unthinkable happened. It was almost midnight on a Monday last September, and her phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. She got out of bed and went over to her computer, her body pulsing with adrenaline. Messages were pouring in on the Discord server she moderated. She began to panic.

“What the fuck is happening,” one Discord user wrote in the general chat. “Yall i cant go to sleep now,” wrote another. “Dude I have school tmr,” someone else chimed in. “Daddy d4vd may be getting canceled,” a separate user wrote.

“D4vd slimed someone,” another user said—slang for murdered.

The Discord server known as “d4vd’s closet,” for fans of the Soundcloud-native singer-songwriter D4vd, was processing horrific news in real time. Hours earlier, on the afternoon of September 8, a decomposing body had been discovered in the front trunk of a black Tesla in a Los Angeles tow yard. It was registered, in Texas, to then-20-year-old David Anthony Burke, the real name of D4vd.

Safiyya, who is 24 and lives in Canada, was near speechless. (She, like many sources in this piece, asked to be identified by either a username, pseudonym, or first name, out of fear of harassment.) “Bro wtf,” she typed into the Discord general chat, her hands shaking. “Just wtfff.” It wasn’t just the gruesome headlines that rattled her. This real-life homicide eerily paralleled the fictional ones depicted in D4vd’s song lyrics and music videos. There was, most obviously, his 2022 breakout hit, “Romantic Homicide,” a moody electronic ballad that Safiyya had first discovered, like so many others, as a viral earworm on TikTok. In the music video, D4vd—dressed as “Itami,” his murderous, blindfolded alter ego—stands in front of a woman’s lifeless, blood-splattered body; a knife drops from his hand.

Then there was the 2025 music video for “One More Dance,” which evokes a 1990s horror movie à la The Blair Witch Project. The opening scene shows Itami, again played by D4vd, dragging his own body across the ground, dumping it in front of a car, and watching as friends stuff it in the trunk. The video culminates with his friends burying him alive in an open grave. Now D4vd’s fans wondered in the Discord server: Was D4vd’s art imitating his life, or was it the other way around?

“D4vd didn’t kill someone itami did,” one user wrote. “He was trying to tell us all along,” wrote another who posted an image of a particularly catchy lyric from “Romantic Homicide”:

“In the back of my mind, I killed you.”

Safiyya joined D4vd’s Discord more than two years earlier. She liked the song “Romantic Homicide,” but more importantly, her crush, whom she’d met while playing a first-person shooter game called Valorant, claimed to be a friend of D4vd’s. When she sent her first message, a simple “ello” in May 2023, she found that others were eager to engage. The server was one giant, constantly active group chat, but with strangers from all over the world. It felt chaotic, unwieldy. Shitposting—a language Safiyya was well versed in from spending years in gaming-related Discord servers—was pervasive.

Things didn’t work out with her crush, but Safiyya liked staying up late after work and chatting with the thousands of people in D4vd’s Discord. She didn’t know much about anyone beyond their avatars and usernames, and it didn’t matter—the conversation almost always circled back to what they all had in common: D4vd’s music. Members debated their favorite tracks (Safiyya’s was “Sleep Well,” a lo-fi R&B love song), compared merch, and shared tour dates they planned to attend.

Safiyya was so active in the chat that, after just a few months, a moderator asked if she’d like to join their ranks. The unpaid role came with a lot of pressure. Seven mods were expected to post at least 500 messages a week. It was a way to encourage engagement, Safiyya says. All the time she put into the Discord server was worth it: She wasn’t just a part of D4vd’s community, she was a curator of it.

In the early hours of September 9, though, Safiyya started to resent her role as moderator. She didn’t like being one of the adults in the room, tasked with wrangling an out-of-control conversation. There was confusion, pandemonium, and, as one might expect from extremely online Zoomers posting on Discord, there were jokes—many in exceptionally poor taste. Some speculated that D4vd had been framed, that the news was fake, or that this was all promo for the forthcoming album D4vd had been teasing incessantly on social media.

As anxious as Safiyya felt, discussing a murder case in real time—one involving a suspect that everyone had at least a parasocial relationship with—was also kind of thrilling. Safiyya was close enough to D4vd that they had each other’s cell phone numbers. He’d even FaceTimed her once to ask for help deleting a Twitch livestream. (Safiyya was on another call and missed it.) She liked D4vd, of course, and felt protective of his career.

Initially, Safiyya thought there was no way D4vd could’ve been involved. He’d just played a show in Chicago, and she figured someone must have borrowed or stolen his car while he was out of town. To her, it seemed like an injustice that this would happen just as D4vd was about to become a world-famous superstar: He was two weeks away from playing the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, before headlining a European tour the following month, capping off a dizzying year in which he also made his Coachella debut. Guilty or not, Safiyya knew the damage had been done.

“Tour finna get cancel 💔💔” Safiyya posted in the general chat of the Discord server. A short while later, in all caps, her frustration boiled over: “This boi got collab left and right just for this shit to happen.”

Soon, the grave reality of the situation began to sink in. “We’re finna end up in a documentary,” one user posted, around 2:15 am. By 7 am, the speculation in D4vd’s Discord server had become so rampant that moderators disabled new posts. Safiyya was scared, feeling as if she’d suddenly been thrust into a criminal investigation.

Over the next several days, D4vd’s remaining tour dates would get canceled, just as Safiyya had predicted; so would the deluxe version of his first studio album, initially slated for release on September 19. His just-launched fashion campaign with Hollister and Crocs would get canned; and the Grammy-winning singer Kali Uchis would pull her duet with D4vd from streaming platforms. It seemed to many of D4vd’s former fans that his arrest for murder would be imminent too.

When it wasn’t, they took matters into their own hands. Overwhelmed by a sense of urgency, onetime D4vd stans began combing through his Discord server, suspecting it contained information so incriminating that it was only a matter of time before it got wiped. In the end, even Safiyya couldn’t have imagined how quickly many of her peers turned against their favorite musician, splintering and spiraling into a feverish—and often personal—quest for justice.

Like most people his age, David Burke grew up on the internet and learned from a young age how to weaponize it. He was born in 2005, the same year YouTube launched, and has been posting videos to the platform since at least the age of 13—around the same time he moved with his devout Christian family from Queens, New York, to a middle-class suburb of Houston. Some of his earliest uploads are screen recordings of his plays on Fortnite, a battle-royale-style video game he was obsessed with. They offered him the attention and social interaction he seemed to be otherwise lacking.

“He was grinding. He was posting every day, playing every day, he was trying his hardest to get somewhere,” says a 21-year-old New York–based gamer who goes by the username Sacred WTF. “Bro, I would just wake up sometimes and it would just be multiple posts from him. He was just trying to pop off, just get one good video.”

By 2021, D4vd was 16 and already building a brand as