Friends remember Brian Ellis, DC plane crash passenger, as 'one of the best'

USA Today

05-02-2025

Friends remember Brian Ellis, DC plane crash passenger, as 'one of the best'
Brian Ellis and his teammates won the Georgia state high school football championship in 1987. By the fall of his senior year in 1988, he was their starting quarterback.
'It was an early sign of his leadership and commitment to team values,' stated a tribute to him this week by the public school district in his hometown in Clayton County, Georgia. Those virtues would follow him through a football career at the U.S. Naval Academy, almost 22 years as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, and in the enduring friendships he maintained until he perished with 66 others in the mid-air collision over Washington, D.C. last week.
Ellis, 53, served as a helicopter pilot and instructor for 12 years of his Marine career, including stints overseas while deployed. For his friends, the irony of his death in a collision with an Army helicopter was tough to handle.
Ellis left his hometown of Morrow, Georgia in 1989 after graduating high school to attend the traditional Plebe Summer at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he had been recruited to play football. During those early weeks, he quickly fell in with three classmates, who became 'the four musketeers,' said Chad Chatlos, another member of the quartet. It would become a lifelong friendship for Ellis, Chatlos, Che' Bolden and Mark McGinnis.
They played four years of Navy football and did a lot of summer training cruises together, he said. The friends headed into the Marine Basic School at Quantico together in 1994, and Chatlos said that Ellis and Bolden roomed together during flight school.
'From 1989 to 2000, we were pretty much together all the time," he said. "Over the years, we always kept in touch.'
'He was a great friend. He'd do anything for you,' Chatlos said. 'All of his friends say he was one of the best.'
Even after everybody started getting married, they 'stayed fast friends,' often vacationing together on beaches in the Florida Panhandle, where Ellis served for years as a flight instructor in Pensacola. Chatlos said their latest events had been retirements.
Ellis was a godfather to children in the McGinnis and Bolden families.
After Bolden posted the news about his friend on LinkedIn this week, the comments section quickly filled with people who fondly remembered Ellis as a classmate, teammate, fellow Marine, leader, great dad and lacrosse coach.
In the later years of his Marine Corps career, Ellis managed public remarks and messaging for the Commandant of the Marine Corps, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also led a team charged with implementing Red Teaming, a planning process where a small group of experts provide critical thought and alternative perspectives to identify risks and problem solving, according to the Marine Corps.
Ellis retired as a Lt. Colonel in 2015 and went to work the next month for Deloitte, an international professional services network, for which he was traveling on business last week.
He is survived by his wife Amy and two sons: Jack, who recently graduated college, and Luke, a senior at Purdue University, as well as his parents and siblings.