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

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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.”

To get around copyright strikes on YouTube, D4vd used a mobile app called Bandlab and royalty-free beats to create viral earworms.Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty Images

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