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, and, ominously, ‘Daddy d4vd may be getting canceled.’

The Discord server known as ‘d4vd’s closet’ 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 to David Anthony Burke, the real name of D4vd.

Safiyya, who is 24 and lives in Canada, was near speechless. ‘Bro wtf,’ she typed into the Discord general chat, her hands shaking. ‘Just wtfff.’ The gruesome headlines weren’t just what rattled her; the real-life homicide eerily paralleled the fictional ones depicted in D4vd’s song lyrics and music videos.

His 2022 breakout hit, ‘Romantic Homicide,’ a moody electronic ballad, showed D4vd—dressed as Itami, his murderous alter ego—standing in front of a woman’s lifeless, blood-splattered body; a knife drops from his hand. In the 2025 music video for ‘One More Dance,’ he dragged his own body across the ground, dumped it in front of a car, and watched as friends stuffed it in the trunk to bury him alive. Now D4vd’s fans wondered: Was his art imitating his life, or was it reality?