David Andrew Ellis, 22, a graduate of High School South, Class of 2002, died of smoke inhalation in a fire on January 24 in College Park, Maryland. He had just begun his last semester at the University of Maryland, where he was majoring in American studies and African-American history.
Born in Snellville, Georgia, he lived in Downers Grove, Illinois before moving to West Windsor in 1994. During high school he played in the school orchestra and was voted “most artistic” in the yearbook. He studied Chinese and traveled to China with the school. He worked at Acme and delivered newspapers for the Times of Trenton in his Grovers Mill Estates neighborhood.
Ellis worked at the university dining commons and was a popular disc jockey at the campus radio station (WMUC) where he hosted his own weekly hip-hop music show. He also worked at campus-area house parties. His record collection included close to 2,”000 selections and he had been writing for “The Black Explosion,” a campus-area newspaper. WMUC had a memorial to him on January 25.
Survivors include his mother, Rochelle Ellis of West Windsor; his father, James Ellis of New York City; his brother, Stephen, 23, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and his sister Erin, who is living in Tokyo, Japan. Also grandmothers Wynona Ellis and Margaret Kerr of St. Louis; aunts and uncles Michael and Thea Ellis of Moline, Illinois, Ralph and Dorothy Kerr of Milford, Massachusetts, and Deborah Wesley of Carson, California.
His funeral was on January 28 at the Princeton United Methodist Church with burial in Princeton Cemetery.
