The Brief

This Wednesday, Dec. 11, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Hyde Park Miriam Matthews Branch will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the building’s opening, as well as the life and legacy of its namesake, Miriam Matthews.

As part of the celebration, the library is putting together a full day of programming to honor Matthews, who was the city’s first Black librarian and a tireless advocate for the arts and against censorship.

About Miriam Matthews’ life

Matthews’ accomplishments run the gamut from advocating for Negro History Week in the city — the precursor to Black History Month — to helping publicly recognize the Black and Indigenous heritage of the pobladores who founded L.A.

When confronted with obstacles, Matthews found a way to advocate for herself after she’d been misled or skipped over for opportunities, including the opportunity to apply for a librarianship at LAPL. In interviews, Matthews always attributed this steadfastness to her parents, who moved to L.A. when she was a toddler to get away from the segregation of the Jim Crow South.

Miriam Matthews

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Courtesy Schlesinger Library, RIAS, Harvard University

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“Even though I wasn’t what I’d call a brash, forward-type person, I always quietly said my piece when I thought something was not right,” Matthews, who died in 2003, said.

She became the city’s first Black librarian in 1927 — and remained the only Black librarian for about two decades. Matthews was a favorite of the patrons across all demographic lines. She quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming the regional librarian for LAPL’s South Central region.

Matthews also set out to document the history of L.A's Black residents, both from her time and before. Her papers, photographs and personal research, which are now hosted at UCLA, were central in determining that many of L.A.’s original founders were of Afro-Mexican.

They also include photos of other historical locations like Bruce’s Beach, which in 2022 was returned to the Black family who'd owned it when it was taken away through public domain nearly 100 years earlier.

Two African American couples standing on a walkway at Bruce's Beach, Manhattan Beach, circa 1920.

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Miriam Matthews Photograph Collections, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

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Matthews was also appointed to the city’s committee for Los Angeles’ bicentennial by Mayor Tom Bradley. She became a main force behind the design of a monument honoring L.A.’s founders, which listed the racial heritage of the city’s founding families, more than half of which had African ancestry.

An advocate for intellectual freedom

Her advocacy extended to intellectual freedom: She argued against censorship in the city’s library system and for “the right to read and to read everything,” even controversial texts. She successfully helped to dispel a library censorship board when she was librarian.

That commitment extended as far as advocating against McCarthyism and advocating for Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to stay on the library’s bookshelves.

“When pressed to explain why she would fight to keep a book like that on the shelf, she said, ‘Because we have to know how our enemies think,’” said Yago Cura, a librarian at the Hyde Park Miriam Matthews Branch. “How can you argue with that?”

Despite not being an artist by training, she also took an interest in visual art, especially the creations of Black artists. Pieces from her collection, which she humbly described as “just things I would enjoy having,” were shown at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Art Museum, The California African American Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, and the African American Museum and Library at Oakland.

Honoring Matthews’ legacy

Miriam Matthews stands to the right of the Founders Plaque in 1982.

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El Pueblo Monument Photo Collection

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Courtesy L.A. Public Library

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For Cura, who is helping to organize the day’s events, the anniversary celebration is a chance to highlight Matthews’ many contributions to the civic life of Los Angeles.

“I'm not Mexican, but I understand how important Guadalupe is to Mexicans,” Cura said. “She's kind of like my Guadalupe. She's kind of like my saint that keeps me grounded in the work that I'm supposed to do as a community minded librarian.”

In keeping with Matthews’ commitment to local arts and literature, the programming will include workshops and programming for all ages. It’ll also feature a poetry reading called Miriam’s Garden, which is right up against Florence Avenue.

“We’re not exposed, but it’s a chain link fence – there's really nothing that separates us from the community,” Cura said. “We're communing with each other, we're listening to people talk about their experiences as people of color.”

The celebration will also feature a workshop with the gardener who maintains the branch’s garden.

“I've even made little magazines, zines that talk about her legacy that we're going to be passing out,” Cura said. “We're gonna be giving out totes and all that good stuff.”

How to participate

Location: 2205 W. Florence Ave, Los Angeles
Phone: 323-750-7241

The library’s celebration will last throughout the day on Wednesday, Dec. 11:

• Special Dedication Ceremony @ 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
• Harvesting Hope with Master Gardener Bobi Lott @ 12:30 – 1:30 PM
• Miriam’s Garden: Poetry Reading Series with special guests and local poets Nikolai Garcia, Jesenia Chavez, and Peter Woods @ 1:30 – 2:30 PM
• Inside Out: Self-Portraits - Children’s Art Program @ 4:00 PM

Twenty years ago, a Los Angeles DJ put out an album that asked a question nobody had quite answered yet: Could the turntable be a lead instrument?

Not just a tool, but the thing carrying the whole record?

Lucas McFadden, also known as Cut Chemist, said “yes.”

His debut solo album, The Audience’s Listening, dropped in 2006 after years of work, sample clearances and a clean break from the group that made him famous. He was a founding member of Jurassic 5, and before that, Ozomatli.

Two decades later, he's been revisiting that record in a series called Expert of None. It’s an intimate show at Only the Wild Ones in Venice, where he traces the records that shaped him right up to this album. The final installment of the series is scheduled for August 2.

“It's a record that I periodically revisit throughout my life just to kind of see where I've been and to know where I need to go next,” McFadden said. “I always like to do something different from what I've done before. This is the year where I really go back and trace the steps of the building blocks that made that record and who I was as an artist leading up to that.”

The art of mixing

Few fans know the behind-the-scenes work it takes for DJs and producers to track down sounds and then get the permission to use them. McFadden said finding and presenting music are two very different processes.

“I feel like a matchmaker, so to speak, because no one else would take things which are from completely opposite ends of the globe and put them together in the same composition,” McFadden said. “Then, you have to track down the artist to ask their permission. It's very interesting and rewarding when they say yes.”

McFadden walked away from the success of Jurassic 5 to devote his time to a solo career. He said the change gave him increased freedom but also increased pressure.

“It was very scary to leave something so successful and really at its peak to do something where I was responsible for both the failures and the successes on my own,” McFadden said. “I couldn't share that blame with anybody. It was all on me. So, I remember putting a lot of pressure on myself, because I was the one in the spotlight. Then the successes were twice as sweet in that regard as well.”

The result was his debut, The Audience’s Listening, which McFadden says is very much an L.A. record.

“I was raised on L.A. radio,” McFadden said.  "Being from here and being in groups like Ozomatli and Jurassic 5, I feel like those two groups couldn't exist anywhere else. They are such a byproduct of the city, coming from places like The Good Life in South Central. L.A. is such a melting pot, and I feel like my life in music is the same reflection of that as well.”

Revisiting the past to create the present

McFadden has been tracing the records that led to The Audience’s Listening during his "Expert of None" events at Only the Wild Ones in Venice. The immersive listening residency explores musical discovery and crate digging culture, revealing the records and influences that shaped the album.

“It's been incredible,” McFadden said. “There's so many things about my life that I didn't realize until I sat down and thought about them in the context of discovering music.”

McFadden says his younger self would be very pleased with the legacy of The Audience’s Listening.

“People still regard it as an album that’s important to them for the DJ culture,” McFadden said. “When it came out in the mid-2000s, DJs were kind of fading away, at least turntablists were. Another type of DJ was emerging, which was a laptop DJ. That opened the door for a lot of people that in some cases probably shouldn't be DJs, but wouldn't if this technology didn't exist. So, it was a very confusing time to put out a DJ turntablist record. I feel like I did well, and after 20 years of thinking about it and living in that world, I'm happy where it stands.”

Tickets for Cut Chemist’s Aug. 2 event at Only the Wild Ones are currently sold out, but fans can join a waiting list.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge ruled Monday that there is enough evidence to put singer D4vd on trial in the killing and dismemberment of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez after, authorities said, she had threatened to expose their relationship and crater his career.

Los Angeles Judge Charlaine Olmedo decided the evidence prosecutors presented at a preliminary hearing that spanned five days provided probable cause for a trial on charges of murder, continuous sexual abuse of a child under the age of 14 and unlawful mutilation of human remains.

“The people have met their burden on all counts,” Olmedo said. She ordered that Burke continue to be held without bail.

D4vd, the 21-year-old singer born David Burke whose career was steeply rising before the allegations emerged, has pleaded not guilty. He showed no emotion when the judge issued her ruling. Defense lawyers declined to comment outside court after the ruling.

Olmedo emphasized that the probable cause standard for a preliminary hearing like this is much lower than the threshold at trial. However, prosecutors asserted the evidence was overwhelming.

“Based on the mountains of evidence presented,” Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman said, “all of the allegations have been proved way beyond the standard required.”

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said outside court that prosecutors are still weighing whether to seek the death penalty. Burke is to be arraigned Aug. 31.

Prosecutors on Monday wrapped up their case by giving a moment-by-moment account of Rivas Hernandez’s last night, showing that after a stream of text messages with Burke, her phone went permanently silent when she arrived at his home.

As she neared his Hollywood home shortly after 10 a.m. on April 23, 2025, in an Uber he had sent to pick her up, she sent her final text: “girly pop i’m almost there open ur door if ur home.”

Prosecutors allege Burke stabbed her to death when she came through the door.

The night before, the two argued via text about his relationship with a woman. She sent him an angry and profane text saying she will tell her dad so many lies about him and “i will end ur career and ur life.”

Prosecutors said that Burke met Rivas Hernandez when she was 11, began sexually abusing her when she was 13 and he was 18, stabbed her to death when she threatened to report him and ruin his career, and cut up her body in his garage with chain saws.

Prosecutors said they have records showing Burke ordered chain saws and wading pools that he used to dismember her body in his garage, and that her DNA was found there on blood stains discovered when police served a search warrant.

They said he then drove around for weeks and even months with the body in the trunk. Her decomposing body was found in the Tesla registered to Burke that was towed from the Hollywood Hills in September, a little more than four months later.

Prosecutors said the car was parked around the corner from his house, and surveillance video will show he was the last person to drive it.

Defense argues there’s insufficient evidence for murder

After the final witness on Monday, the defense argued that the evidence was insufficient and the murder charge should be dismissed.

“There’s no evidence that Mr. Burke harbored a deliberate intent to kill Miss Hernandez,” said Burke’s attorney, Marilyn Bednarski.

She said the communications between Burke and Rivas Hernandez showed “no threat, no evidence of a history of violence” and that he had “the opposite of homicidal malice” toward her.

She argued that a medical examiner ruling that her death was a homicide from two puncture wounds was too vague and inconclusive to be evidence of murder. The defense did not directly give an alternative theory on how she died and isn’t required to.

The defense showed several other texts from Rivas Hernandez threatening him about their relationship, and saying she would go to Burke’s mother, talk to his friends and “leak” information about them.

Under questioning from defense attorney Blair Berk, Farrell said he saw no indication that she ever threatened to go to police or pursue any legal action against him.

The defense also established that she had asked seven times to come to see him in the days before her death, and he reluctantly agreed only after she demanded it, and that she had threatened to kill Burke and to mutilate him.

The defense argued that all of the malice had come from her.

Silverman told the judge that “the defense tried numerous times throughout these proceedings to dirty up the victim” despite her being a child.

The detective also said under questioning from Berk that the parents of both Burke and Rivas Hernandez knew about their relationship, that he had attended church with members of her family and that her parents had given their consent for her to go to London with him for a week.

Prosecution alleges D4vd immediately began covering up the killing

After her phone went silent, Burke sent her several other messages that night asking where she was, and expressing concern. Prosecutors allege those messages were sent as cover after he had killed her.

Prosecutors allege Burke dismembered the body in his garage. A police analyst testified earlier in the hearing that samples pulled from apparent blood stains there matched her DNA.

Her body was found in a Tesla registered to him nearly five months later.

Detective documents sexual abuse

In earlier testimony, Farrell recounted dozens of sexually explicit photos of Burke and Rivas Hernandez and years of text messages that described the same things, along with conversations that indicated she had gotten an abortion in 2024 at 13 after he got her pregnant.

Farrell described the photos that could not be shown in court, material so graphic that it left Rivas Hernandez’s mother in tears and prompted both parents to leave the courtroom on Friday. They were back in court Monday.

D4vd’s career was reaching new heights at time of killing

D4vd (pronounced “David”) became an online musical phenomenon as a teen with a blend of indie rock, R&B and lo-fi pop. He had huge followings on TikTok, Soundcloud and Spotify, where his top songs, including his 2022 breakthrough “Romantic Homicide,” have more than a billion plays.

In 2024 he played the Coachella music festival and released his first full-length album, “Withered,” two days after authorities say Rivas Hernandez was killed.