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.…