As Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s family prepares to mark what would have been her 16th birthday, they are urging prosecutors to seek the harshest possible punishment against D4vd.

In an exclusive statement to the California Post, Celeste’s parents said they believe the death penalty would be the “perfect” sentence for the jailed singer, who has been accused of killing and dismembering the teenager last year.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman is now deciding whether to pursue capital punishment or life in prison for the performer, whose legal name is David Burke, as his trial is expected to move forward later this year.

Celeste would have turned 16 on Monday. The following day marks the first anniversary of the grim discovery of her body, which was found in the back of a Tesla at a Hollywood tow yard.

Alongside the release of a previously unseen photo of their daughter, the family told The Post: “If the death penalty were activated, it would be perfect for this kind of human being, devoid of feelings and emptiness inside, and without conscience, who only caused pain to our daughter, our family, and the world that supports our precious daughter.”

It added: “But that’s not in our hands, but rather in God’s, and the California justice system.” It’s signed “The Rivas Hernandez Family.”

The decision on whether Burke faces life in prison or death if convicted on the charges lies in Hochman’s hands.

Last Monday, moments after Burke dropped his high profile legal team for a public defender in a dramatic hearing, Hochman took to the mics and said he had not made a decision yet. 

The DA said he was awaiting a mitigation packet from Burke’s previous legal team outlining the reasons why Burke should not face the death penalty, but had not received it.

He said he will allow the new public defender time to submit a packet if he chooses. Hochman earlier this year reversed policy when it came to the death penalty, releasing a ground breaking statement. 

He said: “Effective immediately, the prior administration’s extreme and categorical policy forbidding prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in any case is rescinded.

“In its place, the new murder with special circumstances policy will consider pursuing the death penalty only after an extensive and comprehensive review and only in exceedingly rare cases.”

He also said families of murder victim’s survivors will have “consultation” and “full input, to ensure that the punishment sought by the office is just, fair, fitting and appropriate.”

The Post contacted the DA’s office for reaction to the Rivas Hernandez statement. 

Celeste’s parents watched in horror during D4vd’s hearings over the past few weeks as horrific images of her decapitated and mutilated corpse were displayed in a court.

Her family ignored their attorney’s request to look away as the pictures were displayed in a Los Angeles courtroom during the first day of the singer’s preliminary hearing last month.

The couple were later spotted crying in the hall of the courthouse after viewing their daughter’s severed limbs, head, torso and fingers that were allegedly found in the trunk of D4vd’s Tesla.

The singer is accused of ordering an Uber to deliver Rivas from her family home in Lake Elsinore to his Hollywood Hills home on the night of April 23, 2025, after dating her for months and getting her pregnant.

He then stabbed her and stood by while she bled out, prosecutors claim.

It is alleged he loaded her body in his Tesla and drove to Santa Barbara. Hernandez’s passport card was allegedly found in the exact same spot Burke’s Tesla was tracked months later by a Cal Trans worker.

Burke allegedly ordered a shovel from Home Depot  and had it delivered to his home by Postmates. About a week later, he ordered two chainsaws from Amazon that were delivered to his home, and on May 5, he allegedly ordered a body bag, heavy-duty laundry bags and a blue inflatable pool, court documents say.

Investigators testified Burke dismembered Hernandez with a chainsaw in the pool. Pieces of it were found on her remains during the autopsy, according to the medical examiner.

A major emergency operation is unfolding at Miami International Airport after an Amazon cargo aircraft ran off a runway, hit several vehicles and burst into flames during a landing at about 2 p.m. local time, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and airport officials who spoke with News Media.

Airport officials said Prime Air Flight 7598 overran Miami International Airport’s diagonal runway and came to a stop disabled near the northwest end of the airfield.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said the aircraft caught fire after the crash, prompting a large-scale response of more than 60 fire units to an incident involving multiple patients.

“Units arrived to find an airplane that had caught on fire as a result of this crash, with heavy flames and smoke showing. Firefighters are working on extinguishing the fire and assessing patients,” Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said in a post on X.

Fire officials also told News Media that crews remain focused on putting out the flames while evaluating and treating multiple patients at the scene.

Authorities have not yet released details on injuries or fatalities.

The FAA said 21 Air Flight 7598, a Boeing 767-300, departed from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 

County CAD records indicate the emergency call was received at about 1:55 p.m.

The FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center noted there is a ground stop at MIA in effect until at least 4:30 p.m.

“All runways and taxiways at MIA are currently closed as of 3:00 p.m. and a ground stop is in effect,” airport officials said. 

The FAA will investigate the incident. 

Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also said first responders were assessing the scene.

“We’ve issued a full ground stop at Miami International while first responders assess the scene after an Amazon cargo plane overran the runway. If you’re traveling through the area, please expect significant delays and potential cancellations,” he said in a post on X. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Dave Mustaine has long traced some of his earliest and most volatile songwriting to what he describes as “religious abuse” during his upbringing, shaped by his mother’s strict devotion to the Jehovah’s Witness faith until her death in 1990.

The Megadeth frontman has said the rules of that childhood — no birthday parties, no Christmas presents and not even participation in the Pledge of Allegiance — left him feeling isolated, robbing him of a normal youth and setting him apart from other children.

By his teenage years, Mustaine pushed back hard. He has spoken about turning toward black magic and the occult before eventually breaking into the music world as the lead guitarist for Metallica.

After being dismissed from the future Grammy-winning metal giants amid struggles with drugs and alcohol, Mustaine launched Megadeth, the band that would make him a thrash metal icon with tracks such as “Symphony of Destruction” and “Holy Wars.”

Now 64, the veteran rocker has suggested that the religion at the center of his childhood played a role in an even deeper family wound — a painful chapter he says has followed him for decades and, heartbreakingly, can never be fully repaired.

In his upcoming memoir, In My Darkest Hour, Mustaine, who also battled throat cancer in 2019, writes about growing up in a ‘weird and dysfunctional household (I wouldn’t even call it a home).’

He says he always suspected that the woman who raised him, Emily Marie Mustaine, was not his mother at all, but that one of his sisters had committed the cardinal sin of getting pregnant as an unwed teenager.

‘Maybe,’ he writes in the memoir, ‘out of embarrassment and religious and social pressure, they had “gone away” for a while (as people sometimes did in those days), and then turned the baby over to grandma to raise as her own. Grandma, in this case, being the woman I knew as my mother.’

He adds: ‘Maybe the tumult had contributed to my father disappearing.’

His mother and violent alcoholic father got divorced when Mustaine was just four. Mustaine has talked in the past about how he lived in fear of his father’s unpredictable and violent mood swings.

‘Maybe,’ he adds, ‘it had led my mother into the insane vortex of religious zealotry.

‘I can’t fully explain why I felt this way, but I did. Sometimes I’d even dream about it.’

In those dreams, his mother and father were both absent, and in their place was his oldest sister, Michelle.

‘She was always looking out for me, in a doting, caring kind of way, like she was worried something terrible would happen.

‘We looked alike, too, which I realize is not much of a shock, given that we were siblings, but I always wondered why I bore more of a resemblance to my sister – well, to all three of my sisters, actually – than to my own mother.’

Of course, he admits this could all have simply been a case of wishful thinking – a childish desire to make sense of his chaotic, traumatic childhood.

But just as he was finishing his memoir, he received a mysterious call from his middle sister, Suzanne, who is in hospice with Parkinson’s, ‘suffering from all the horrific stuff that comes with that disease, including dementia.’

He writes: ‘She drifts in and out of lucidity, telling stories that are dead accurate and others that make no sense whatsoever.’

Together with his sister’s assistant, he attempted to piece together coherent sentences from this ‘admittedly fuzzy conversation.’

They heard the name ‘David.’

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‘What did you say?’ the assistant asked.

Suzanne mumbled some more.

‘He’s your baby?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You mean David?’

After a long pause, Suzanne replied: ‘Yes.’

Mustaine admits his sister could have been using the word ‘baby’ in the colloquial sense – ‘as a big sister might do when referring to a little brother.

‘Or,’ he adds, ‘does one read something more gothic into it, something more sinister?’

What, he muses, if it wasn’t Michelle who was his mother at all. She’d been the eldest – 18 years older than Mustaine – so it made most sense. She was also very protective and loving around her baby brother.

Suzanne, on the other hand, had been just 15 when Mustaine was born.

‘Her giving birth to an illegitimate child would have been more scandalous. And maybe that would explain the bitterness and the resentment she so often exhibited toward me,’ he writes.

‘Maybe I had ruined her life. Maybe the mere fact of my existence provoked sadness and anger.

‘Or maybe my imagination was working overtime, as it sometimes does.’

Whatever the truth, he will likely never find the answer he seeks.

Both his mother and Michelle are now dead. His youngest sister, Debbie, meanwhile, is just three years older than he is, so has no memory of his birth.

‘And Suzanne is here, but not really here,’ he writes. ‘So it will remain an enigma for the rest of my life.

‘What is the importance of any of this?’ he asks. ‘Why not leave it all behind, with the other detritus of my Dickensian childhood? Why burrow into rabbit holes best left unexplored?

‘I guess the answer to that would be: I don’t want to leave it behind. I don’t want to forget. The memories drive me. The hunger, physical and metaphorical, motivates me to live a better life, to make the most of my time on the planet. I’ve always felt that way, but cancer has a way of turning up the volume on the ticking clock.’

The guitarist, who converted to Christianity around 2002 and, for years, refused to play some of the band’s most controversial hits, admits that he’d spent a lot of time praying during cancer treatment.

Those prayers, he says, were largely focused on keeping his family, wife of 35 years Pam and their children Electra, 28, and Justis, 34, together.

Now seven years cancer free, he writes: ‘Here we are, the same tight family we’ve always been. I can’t help but feel blessed, and it isn’t so much cancer that drives that point home, but the persistent, ceaseless memory of where I came from and the fractured family from which I escaped.’

In My Darkest Hour by David Mustaine is published September 8 by Da Capo, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

Rapid progress in artificial intelligence could bring humans closer than ever to understanding—and potentially communicating with—animals. But as the technology advances, some researchers and advocacy groups are raising a new concern: whether decoding animal behavior may intrude on animals’ right to privacy.

Using machine learning, scientists are increasingly able to sort, analyze and even reproduce the calls, songs and signals animals use with one another. Supporters say these AI tools could transform the study of animal communication, offering deeper insight into how other species navigate their social worlds.

Yet the ethical implications are still catching up with the science. “One risk that is currently not taken into account in research ethics is the concern that we might be violating the privacy of animals by collecting data on their vocalizations and movements,” researchers wrote in an article published by Springer Nature.

The authors argue that privacy is not only a human concern. “An interest in privacy is an interest in controlling how you appear to others, and the complex social lives of many nonhuman animals offer strong support for thinking animals have this interest.”

Beyond privacy, experts warn that the ability to “speak” with animals could create broader risks for ecosystems if the technology is misused or disrupts natural behavior in the wild.

The controversy involves a technique known as “playback,” which is the practice of broadcasting recorded animal calls in the wild.

Biologist Vittorio Baglione, who has spent his career cataloging the calls of carrion crows, was blown away by how AI models could help sort his recordings and point out commonalities in specific cries.

Among the calls was one that Baglione described as essentially, “Hey! Come help!” as the crows would use it to summon others to help defend the nest, he told Bloomberg.

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But Baglione said his research and the breakthroughs in communication could be co-opted by hunters or anyone with ill-intent to lure in the crows.

“You can stress the animals. You can disrupt their social environment. You can pose conflicts between them, especially if you don’t really understand the meaning of the call,” the scientist said of such playback.

This is why playback remains controversial, as it takes advantage of an animal’s trust in a specific sound to make it act in whatever way the user wants, explained César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of the More-Than-Human Life, or MOTH, Program at New York University.

In his 2025 report on the development of AI models striving for animal communication, Rodríguez-Garavito said the technology has the capacity to expose animals to mobs of people wanting to chat or to even weaponize them.

Researchers and animal-rights groups have pointed to previous playback experiments to show the distress an animal can suffer when confronted with an imitation call from a machine.

In 2007, zoologist Katy Payne admitted she caused an elephant great distress when playing a recording of her dead grandfather’s voice.

Despite the concerns, there remains a $10 million reward for a project that can establish communication with an animal without that animal recognizing that it is communicating with humans.

Private equity billionaire Jeremy Coller, who funds the Coller Doolittle Challenge, said during the challenge’s latest prize event in June that humans will likely reach this goal within the decade.

“Because AI is so fast, I have absolute conviction we will crack the code by 2030,” he said.

The Trump administration’s effort to press Iraq’s new prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, to break up pro-Iran militant networks is still advancing, despite signs of friction and delays along the way.

Regional analysts are watching the situation cautiously, with some expressing guarded optimism. But in late August, a senior Iraqi official signaled that Baghdad does not view Sept. 30 as a firm deadline for disarming the Iran-backed groups known as the Popular Mobilization Units, or PMU, also referred to as the Popular Mobilization Forces.

Iraq’s government is attempting to bring these powerful, state-linked but often independently operating militias under tighter official control by folding them into the country’s formal institutions. Muqtada al-Sadr, the influential Iraqi Shiite cleric who commands the Saraya al-Salam armed group, said in May that he supported such integration. However, more hardline factions aligned with Tehran, including Kataeb Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, have insisted they will neither surrender their weapons nor merge into the Iraqi state structure.

Qasim al-Araji, the prime minister’s security adviser, clarified the government’s position in an Aug. 23 interview with Al Iraqiya, saying, “Sept. 30 is the date for the international coalition to depart, not the deadline to hand over weapons.” The coalition he referenced is the U.S.-led force that helped defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria during Trump’s first term. Baghdad has not clearly explained why it appears to be stepping back from a fixed timetable for PMU disarmament.

A spokesman for the Iraqi embassy declined to comment on the mixed messaging from Iraq’s government and on the timetable for dissolving or integrating the PMU.

Just days before al-Araji’s announcement, a representative of the Iraqi government sent News Media a statement: “Prime Minister Ali Faleh Al-Zaidi: All political forces fully agree on moving forward with restricting weapons to state control, and work is underway on mechanisms for surrendering weapons and bringing this issue to a complete end.”

Al-Zaidi told the Baghdad Dialogue Conference at the same time that “all political forces agree on moving forward to ensure that all arms remain under state authority and on developing mechanisms for the handover of weapons. There are no intentions or prospects of any military confrontation, and we will not allow Iraq’s enemies to exploit any opportunity. The presence of weapons outside state authority creates an environment that discourages investment, which is unacceptable because it does not serve the interests of Iraqis.”

In May, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Ali Maarij Al-Bahadly, Iraq’s deputy minister of oil, because he, according to the designation, “abuses his position to facilitate the diversion of oil to be sold for the benefit of the Iranian regime and its proxy militias in Iraq.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time, “Like a rogue gang, the Iranian regime is pillaging resources that rightfully belong to the Iraqi people,” adding “Treasury will not stand idly by as Iran’s military exploits Iraqi oil to fund terrorism against the United States and our partners.”

In late August, the UAE’s The National paper reported that “Iraq’s anti-corruption body announced that deputy oil minister, Al-Bahadly, was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined millions of dollars for corruption.

Reacting to reports that Iran approved passage of Iraqi oil tankers via the Strait of Hormuz, Alberto Fernandez, former U.S. ambassador and Mideast analyst, claimed that “the profit from that Iraqi oil goes, in part, to pay for Iran’s own Iraqi militias/death squads on the Iraqi government’s payroll.” 

An Iraqi government spokesman dismissed Fernandez’s comments, telling News Media, “That is not accurate.”

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A State Department spokesperson told News Media, “Iraq has embarked on a new direction under the leadership of Prime Minister Al-Zaidi in full partnership with the United States. As President Trump made clear when he hosted Prime Minister Al-Zaidi’s historic July 14 visit, the United States strongly supports his vision to ensure a brighter future for all Iraqis free from terrorism, to prevent attacks in and from Iraqi territory, and to deliver a strong and mutually beneficial U.S.-Iraq partnership.”

Entifadh Qanbar, a former spokesman for the deputy prime minister of Iraq during the George W. Bush administration, told News Media: “We were all hoping that Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi would take decisive action against the militias, especially after his visit to the White House and the widespread praise he received from President Trump. I was always skeptical, very skeptical, but I believed he deserved a chance.”

Qanbar added, “Initially, some militias such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Imam Ali (sanctioned by the U.S.) merely issued statements claiming they would hand over their weapons. There has been no credible evidence that they have actually disarmed.”

Qanbar claimed that “any remaining hope was further diminished after IRGC [Islamic Republic Guard Corps] Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani visited Baghdad. According to multiple reports, he instructed militia leaders to slow down any discussion of disarmament, reject the September 30 deadline, and maintain their weapons as part of Iran’s broader regional deterrence strategy.”

When asked about Iraqi state efforts to dismantle the PMU, Elizabeth Tsurkov, a senior non-resident fellow at the New Lines Institute in Washington, D.C., told News Media, “The Iraqi government is trying. It genuinely carried out some moves. Unfortunately, because the militias are extremely willing to use force against their own people, including against security forces, the government finds itself in a position of backing down in the face of these militias.”

She noted, “The militias have penetrated most state institutions… and you see repeated situations of the state backing down.” Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization, kidnapped Tsurkov in 2023 and held her hostage for nearly two years. The Trump administration secured her release in 2025.

The power of the PMU was demonstrated in a recent setback for the Iraqi government.

Both Qanbar and Tsurkov cited the case of the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), which arrested Abbas al-Yaqubi, the head of intelligence for the Popular Mobilization Forces’ Baghdad Belt Operations Command.

A few days after al-Yaqubi’s arrest, he was transferred to the PMU intelligence branch. Qanbar said: “Al-Yaqubi has long been involved in violence against Iraqi activists, and many viewed his arrest as an important signal that the government was finally willing to confront powerful militia figures. What seemed like a significant step forward turned into a major setback.”