Withered continued the macabre imagery of “Romantic Homicide.” The merch for his concert tour included a bloody shirt; in the video for “One More Dance,” a song on the album, a blindfolded and blood-spattered D4vd drags a body (which turns also out to be D4vd) through the dirt, after which a couple of teens stuff it into a car trunk.
Burke named his blood-soaked, blindfolded alternate self Itami, or IT4MI. “IT4MI has been a character that I had for years, even before music,” he told Atwood. “I wanted to put him in comic books. I was writing manga and comic books when I was in middle school. Now, through music, he’s been like the alter ego and the antagonist of this entire thing.”
He said that ever since “Romantic Homicide,” IT4MI has been “the evil version of me, and now he kind of just is woven through my music videos, my art, my visual identity—even the songs! At some points, I’m even experimenting with the idea that IT4MI is writing some of the songs on the project as well.” When his interviewer asked whether IT4MI had started manifesting himself in the real world, Burke revealed that he was experimenting with that—and further suggested that his malevolent character “can manifest in different people, cause them to be chaotic, influence their bad decisions, and fuel their flame to do bad things. It’s going to be an ever-growing thing. I want people to come to the shows as IT4MI; who’s on D4vd’s side, who’s on IT4MI’s side, you know?”
Burke also described the character “wearing a blindfold only to escape his self-made hell, accountable only to pain” in a promo video for the earlier Petals to Thorns EP.
According to Rolling Stone, some of the artists that D4vd collaborated with have now pulled their songs from streaming platforms, and his label has dropped him. Still, since the alleged murder, more people than ever know D4vd’s name. His TikTok and YouTube channels still have more than 6 million subscribers between them, though these days, many probably listen to his music out of ghoulish, rubbernecking curiosity rather than genuine interest.
On Wednesday, Burke’s defense team asked for more time to review the evidence, including what the prosecution said is 40 terabytes of digital evidence. Judge Olmedo agreed to postpone the preliminary hearing till May 26. In the meantime, online sleuths will keep digging. D4vd’s streams will go up. And it’s Celeste Rivas Hernandez—the girl who was found just before what would have been her 15th birthday—who will remain unknown to the world, her own dreams left to decay in a Tesla on a street in the Hollywood Hills.