← Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Hollywood Hills Horror: Disturbing Evidence From Celeste's Remains and Tesla Car Data
00:22:43
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Foreign.
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Hey, everyone, I'm Ashley Banfield, and this is drop dead serious. Another day, another flurry of developments in the case of an up and coming R B singer named David spelled D4VD. Any underage teen runaway who was found dead in the trunk of his Tesla. That is a headline that this singer cannot escape, and nothing good is going to come of it. But David has escaped the limelight. He has been off the grid and out of sight ever since his house was raided, his concert tour was canceled, and the badly decomposed remains of that young girl were shipped off to the medical examiner. There has been so much talk about this case online, but one thing that hasn't had much attention yet is the car. The car itself and the stories that that car can tell us, even if the dead teenager can'. It's a Tesla. A 2023 Model Y. I actually own the same car. And I have been learning so much about the virtual treasure trove of data that my car collects and that my car sends out. Celeste Rivas Hernandez was found in the frunk. That's the forward trunk. It was David's Tesla. And by all indications, Celeste had been in that frunk for a while, locked in there, wrapped in plastic, baking in the Los Angeles summer sun. And here's why that matters. What happened inside that car, the heat, the conditions, the rate of decomposition, it changed the state of her remains. And what's more, the Tesla itself may hold clues about who put her in there. Data, location, history, times that the trunk opened and closed, which car doors opened and close, passenger as well as driver, side door. Might there have been two people? Where had the car come from before being abandoned? And that car might even tell us who was driving it when it was abandoned and who closed that trunk for the very last time. There are eight cameras around the outside of a Tesla, and it can pull in video and pictures constantly. There's also a camera inside that Tesla also can record pictures of who's driving. This is technology that could tell investigators things that no eyewitness ever could. If you're brand new to this story, and if you want the full timeline of everything that's happened in this story, I've put one together. I actually put together a playlist with all of our coverage on Celeste's disappearance and her death, and you'll see it in the episode description. But in this particular episode, we're zeroing in on the clues that Celeste's body might be able to tell us about her killer. And we're also digging into the forensic data from the Tesla itself, the secrets that that car might be able to reveal falls in full swing and it is the perfect time to refresh your wardrobe with pieces that feel as good as they look. And luckily Quince makes it easy to look polished but also stay warm and save big without compromising on the quality. 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Go to quince.com drop dead serious for free shipping on your order and a 365 day return. That's Q U I N C E. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com drop dead serious. You do not need to be a forensic expert to understand what happens when a body is locked inside the trunk of a black Tesla in the middle of a Los Angeles summer. The heat accelerates the decomposition, turning the car into a virtual oven. By the time Celeste's body was discovered on September 8, that's one day after her 15th birthday. The decomposition was so advanced that some reports suggested only her head and torso were recognizable. Other reports said she'd been dismembered and the LAPD is not clearing up any of it. So here's the question. Was Celeste in fact dismembered or was the decomposition so extreme that it only appeared that way? The LA medical examiner still hasn't determined her official cause or manner of death. They've listed it as deferred. And yet Celeste's remains have finally been released back to her family. So what were the investigators able to find out before she was returned? And are some of those answers now gone forever? Earlier on my News Nation Show, Banfield 10pm Shout out to News Nation. I put those questions to Joseph Scott Morgan. He's a certified death investigator, the distinguished Scholar of Applied Forensics at Jacksonville State University, and he's the host of the hit podcast Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Here's our conversation and let me tell you something. You're going to learn a lot about what the body can tell you when it can't speak.
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A
I just can't believe this report that the body has been returned to the family. Would they list the cause and manner of death the minute they find it or the fact that it's not listed and the remains have been returned?
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B
Does that mean we're not going to get it?
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C
No, I don't know that it necessarily means that we're not going to get the cause of death. I think that it might be coming. However, it might be vague. We might hear things like homicidal trauma and nonspecific homicidal trauma. Perhaps. But here's something I want you to understand. If you look at the flyer that they put out when she was missing, you notice her weight. It was 120.
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A
Yeah. Now wasn't it like 70 pounds or something crazy.
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C
Right when they recovered her remains? Ash 71 pounds. That's 49 pounds she's missing. So what can we determine from that? Well, we've heard reports of dismemberment and there was one report from the police that said the body was not intact. So either we're missing something or she in such an advanced state of decomposition. And look, I don't want to go too far over the top here, but bodies do have a tendency to break down and even liquefy to a certain degree. And in this heat, and I even remember in August, I've got friends in LA and they were talking about it was a record breaking heat wave that they were in during this specific period of time. And heat, as we know, speeds everything up, particularly decomposition.
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A
Well, we all know how hot a car can get. This is a black Tesla. It is the trunk. It is outside, likely in late August, early September in la. Can you give me an idea of how fast a body can be in advanced or liquefied decomposition in that kind of an environment?
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C
Yeah, relatively quickly. And if she's been packaged like in plastic in any way, that's also going to cause the body to sweat as well. Contained within that pla. Within. Within a plastic packaging, I'd heard some indication that that may have occurred. And again, it's literally like being in an oven. The body begins to reduce. It's like any other organic substance that you place into this environment, it's going to react and interact with the environment, and the heat and the temperature are going to dictate the rate. The problem is, Ash, as you're trying to measure this out without specific dates, you know, I began to think about what the status of the remains would be throughout this process. If she was compromised physically after death, if someone had attempted to do something with her body, where's the rest of it? How much was lost during this procedure? And then you couple that with the fact that she's going to be subjected to heat that's going to even give rise to quicker decomposition. People don't realize that.
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A
Let me be like I'm going to go rapid fire because I have a lot of questions for you and only two minutes left. But if. Is it possible she could decompose to a point where even early investigators would think she's dismembered, but she wasn't. She's there. She's just liquefied in so many places they couldn't tell.
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C
No, they do not throw around the term dismemberment without specific evidence of that. You're going to have tool marks here.
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A
Okay. With the decomposition, can you back time, time of death? Would the ME be able to determine time of death?
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C
They're only going to give you very broad strokes, Very broad strokes relative to time. Those parameters are very difficult to set, particularly this far down range down the timeline.
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I'm sorry, how broad? How broad?
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C
I'd say probably they are not going to be able to narrow it down any more than about three weeks, probably.
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A
Oh, gosh, that's not gonna help. Okay, how about toxicology? In the advanced state of decomposition, will they be able to tell if she OD'd or if she was. Or she was OD'd? I mean, there's a homicide version of being overdosed, and then there's, you know, an accidental suicide of overdose. Will they be able to tell if there's drugs involved?
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C
Yeah, there's two things that we do. Just so that everybody understands at this point in time. You're not gonna do a blood draw. It's gonna be probably worthless. You're gonna go to the organs. What we do is we take samples of end of the brain and those will be spun down in a centrifuge. Now, what you will be able to do is you can get a qualifying amount, but you're not going to be able to get a quantified amount. So if you're looking for an od, basically all they'll be able to Say is that, yes, there were these drugs in her system, but you can't give a specific number relative to therapeutic range versus OD range.
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A
Okay, the next question's a big one because a lot of people are asking and some are throwing it out there without proof that Celeste might have been pregnant. But that's. We've seen this before, right? Girlfriend gets pregnant, boyfriend doesn't want the baby, and things go sideways. Not saying it happened with David and Celeste. However, with advanced decomposition, if she were pregnant, could the investigators tell that.
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C
Yeah, the key is gonna be the uterus here, I think. I don't know how much information we could get relative to hormonal change, which are things that we look for in pregnancy. Right. In the postpartum state, though, what you're going to be looking for is the uterus. Does the uterus survive? Is it still there or has it been done away with? If it's there, there might be some histological changes you could appreciate, but you know, I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
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If it's not. If the uterus is not intact, there's no way to tell just from the liquefied remains if the hormonal changes are there or if evidence.
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C
I think that it would be. I think that would be very, very difficult. Those tests are very, very sensitive and this far down range, I don't know if they're. If that's going to be possible.
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A
Okay, if it is possible. If her uterus. Because they did say they found a torso. So if her uterus was intact and they are able to determine if she's pregnant, if she were pregnant, would they be able to determine paternity even in advanced decomposition?
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C
Oh, excellent question. That's really difficult to determine. I would say probably not point. Particularly if they can't recover a fetus. And you know, we've heard all kinds of wild rumors about this sort of thing, and I don't know that anything is going to be there. They haven't released that information yet. So I'm going to be sitting around just like you, waiting to hear more info from the medical examiner. I wouldn't hold my breath, though. I'd say that we've probably still got four to six weeks before we're going to hear anything. They're going to try to test every possible item that they recovered at autopsy and not, not just that, but they're going to be exploring cause of here, her neck muscles, strap muscles, hyoid, and also anything relative to skeletal structure. Did she have a skull fracture in any way or was there any kind of bullet trauma? A lot to be learned from here.
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A
Yeah. I've got 10 seconds left, but I've got to ask you. It was in the impound lot for only a couple of days. It was abandoned street side for about five. So let's just say around eight days in the hot sun in Los Angeles. How advanced do you expect her decomposition to be and how many answers do you think we will get?
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C
Yeah, very advanced. You're going to have significant what's referred to as skin slippage. I still have this idea, I don't know, that her body was in that car the entire time. Was it in a structure somewhere else? And then people wanted to get separation from the body as the body began to turn, put it in the car, move it down the street and get rid of the smell, get rid of the body, but yet be able to keep an eye on it.
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A
It's why you are so popular with your podcast, Body Bags. Joseph Scott Morgan. I always appreciate our conversations as macabre as they are. You're so informative. So thank you for this.
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C
Thank you, ma'.
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Am.
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C
Appreciate it. Ash, good to see you.
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B
And while Joseph Scott Morgan helped us understand what Celeste's remains might still reveal, there's another piece of this puzzle that investigators are counting on. The Tesla itself. They may not have much to go on, or maybe they do and they're just not telling us. But what they have in their possession is an unbelievable bank of information. Teslas are loaded with info. They've got cameras and sensors and banked data. They've even got satellite information. And in a case like this, that could mean everything. As I said, it's a Tesla Model Y, a 2023. I drive one. And like every Tesla, it doesn't just run on a battery, it runs on data. These cars are constantly pulling in information and just as often sending it out. So the question is, what could David's Tesla tell the investigators about the final moments of Celeste's life? To figure out what kind of digital treasure trove the investigators could be coming through right now. I talked to one of the best in the business earlier on my nation Show Banfield Again, shout out, 10pm Eastern. Jason Lewis is one of the nation's top digital forensics experts. He spent years in law enforcement working with the Secret Service on its electronic crimes task force. And now he trains police at the National Computer Forensic Institute, part of Homeland Security and full disclosure here. He recently worked on a multi million dollar case against Tesla while driving a Tesla himself. So he Knows a thing or two about these rolling hard drives. Here's our conversation.
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I know that my car has eight cameras on the outside and one camera pointing right at me as the driver on the inside. But what I don't know is if it is recording me at all times and I wasn't even aware of it.
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D
Well, it depends on if you're actually using autopilot or not. Because if you're using the autopilot feature, then yes, the inside camera is recording at all times. But if you're not using the autopilot feature or any of the self driving features, then it's not actually recording you. Generally speaking. You can opt in to share some of the data from that internal camera with Tesla, but it would only do that according to the manual. It's only supposed to do that during crashes or critical events.
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A
So if you're a bit of an idiot like me, I get in the car and I figure out how to drive it and I drive. And I don't look any deeper into all the little special things 20 layers down. Effectively, what do you expect this particular data in this Tesla might tell us about who was on the outside of the car, getting into the driver's seat, driving into the abandoned location, and maybe opening that trunk and closing it for the last time. What will we know about that?
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D
Well, it's all going to depend on if sentry mode was turned on, because if sentry mode was actually activated on the vehicle, then it's doing a lot of recording of video footage from its eight external cameras. And so if that was the case, then you'd actually have clips of the people opening the door, a clip of someone opening the trunk, and that could possibly be recovered by the police. Now, if sentry mode's not turned on, then it's not going to be doing any of those recordings. And what you'll get is recordings when the vehicle's in motion versus when it stays.
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A
So this vehicle was in motion, presumably with Celeste's body in it, because it was abandoned. Do you think there'll be data that's retrievable about where it drove from before it ended up in its final resting spot in the abandoned street side prior to being towed. And will it register when that trunk closed for the last time?
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D
Yes, it should. It's all a matter of whether or not that data is still on the car or if it's on the Tesla servers. So your vehicle actually communicates with the Tesla servers almost constantly. And it's usually doing that over a cellular connection, but it can also do it over WI Fi. So it's sending a treasure trove of information back to the Tesla servers. And so as long as the information is still either on that server or the car, then you can get a lot of information, such as when were the doors open, when was the truck open, trunk opened? And then as long as the memory stick that records all the videos hasn't been removed from the vehicle, because that is the only thing that a individual that owns the vehicle can actually do to wipe data effectively and quickly is to pull the memory stick. And if you do that, that's where all the video recordings are stored for the sentry mode.
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Can they do it from a remote location? Can they wipe what's on that memory stick from a remote location?
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D
Yes, actually, they can. So you can just do it with your Tesla app. And so, as you said in your introduction, I have a Tesla, so I use Sentry mode, and I can go in and look at those videos at any time. I can actually activate some of the cameras straight from my smartphone. And so if you do that, you can watch the videos and then you can also delete them from the internal memory of the car from your app.
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A
Is there a delete file? Is there a delete file? Like, you know, if I can delete something on my computer, the police can still find it. Is it the same with the Tesla?
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D
It all depends because of the type of memory that it's using. It's like a really fancy thumb drive, basically. If they get that drive out of the car rather quickly, then, yes, there's a very good likelihood they can recover those deleted videos. But if they were deleted and then a lot of other videos were created after the fact, then they might not be able to recover. Such as the car sat for, say, eight days and the sentry mode kept activating after they deleted all the video footages, then there is a less likelihood that they'll actually be able to retrieve the video of the body being placed in the vehicle.
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A
And I think you already mentioned that we will know when the trunk was last opened and closed, correct?
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D
Yes, the vehicle does keep track of that, but it's a matter of whether or not the police are going to be able to get that information.
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A
Meaning will Tesla play ball or will they have to subpoena Tesla?
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D
Exactly. So the information is on the vehicle, but it's really hard to get off the vehicle. And on a 2023 Model Y, it's near impossible for anyone but Tesla to actually get that data off of the vehicle due to the Encryption.
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A
Yeah, they've been helpful before when that. When that cybertruck blew up at the hotel, you know, Elon Musk's company handed over all sorts of information, and we found out everything about that. That guy who did it last. Quick question. Once that final trunk closed, is there data that will record as to whether it's just one person who got in the driver's side and drove it to where it is, or will it record that a passenger door may have opened as well, and we might know if more people are involved in this sinister act?
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D
Yes, you should be able to see what doors were open, and also, if it had any passengers, it does log whether or not there's passengers in the vehicle. It doesn't have, like, a scale to tell you weight, but it will tell you if there were passengers sitting there. And it's part of the seat belt and airbag system.
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A
I keep my sentry mode on at all time, and my favorite feature is that from a remote location, if I see someone getting near to it, I can press the button and the car will fart. It will actually play fart sounds and, like, freak out the people who are too close. There's all sorts of other sounds, too, but it really is sort of a remarkable vehicle. Jason, I could speak to you forever. Thank you so much for all of this tonight. I appreciate it.
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But there are still so many questions. What exactly happened to Celeste? Who was she with? And how much of that truth might be locked inside that Tesla? We'll keep following this case as it unfolds. Every single new lead, every new report, every new revelation. I'm Ashley Banfield, and as always, the truth isn't just serious, it's dropped. Dead serious.