Student found deceased in California

A University student was found dead late Tuesday night in a public storage facility in East Palo Alto, Calif. Investigators have ruled his death a suicide.

Campus community members were informed of the death of senior Manzili Davis, 21, of Chicago, in a campus-wide email yesterday. The University is planning a memorial service, the date for which has yet to be set.

Davis' mother, Roella, reached at her home in Chicago, remembered her son as a thoughtful child who loved learning.

"He was very serious," she said. "When we would do the family portraits, it would be very difficult; if he didn't have anything to smile about, he didn't see why he should smile."

"He was never shy when he was young. He would speak to people on the street, and if they didn't talk back, he would say it again, louder. As he got older, he kind of drew in a little."

At Princeton, friends described Davis as a quiet procrastinator who loved movies and was dedicated to the Pre-Law Society, of which he served as president during his sophomore year.

"Manzili was a really nice person; he was well-spoken, extremely polite and fairly shy," Jason Cherry '06, who was Davis' suitemate, said. "I last spoke to him two weeks ago, when I bumped into him in the hall."

It remains unclear why Davis was in California. His mother and friends said they are puzzled about why he traveled there.

"The thing is that he was the kind of person that I don't see taking trips like that," Chris Aguilar '06, Davis' friend and freshman year roommate, said. "I think that would be out of his norm ... He was too reserved to just take off like that. My own personal feeling was, like, he probably knew that he wanted to die."

Lyle Williams '06, Davis' freshman and sophomore year roommate, agreed that the trip "didn't seem to fit his character." Williams speculated that Davis, who had talked about applying to law school in the future, may have been considering Stanford Law School.

But Davis' mother said he had intended to go to law school close to home in Chicago. She said she had no idea why he had gone to California.

"It was very shocking when I got that call," she recalled. "California. I don't know why he went there. All they could tell me was he rented a car in New York and drove to California."

Dean of Mathey College Steven Lestition, who had selected Davis to be a peer academic adviser in the college, called him "gentle, courtly, smart and extremely polite with everyone."

"He had a dry sense of humor, and he liked to keep to himself, so he didn't have very many friends," Aguilar said. "He spent a lot of his time on movie websites and reviewing movies online. He had about 2000 reviews of movies online that he had written."

Williams, Davis' former roommate, agreed that Davis kept to himself. "I figured that was just his style, you know? Some people are extroverted, some people are introverted. It didn't really seem like he wasn't happy. It's just kind of like his personality style."

"At first, he seemed to like [Princeton], because there was a lot to do there and there was a challenge, and I guess he enjoyed what he was doing," Roella Davis said. "But over the last couple of years, he just said he wished he had gone somewhere local."

Davis' mother said that in recent months, her son had dropped out of contact and that she had last spoken to him in February or March. "Usually, when he didn't call, I could get him to reply to an email," she said. "But this time, nothing, no response."

Aguilar said that the last time he spoke with Davis — two weeks ago — he was "kind of behind on his thesis." He said he wasn't sure whether Davis, a politics concentrator, had finished his thesis by its April 10 due date but said he knew Davis was "having trouble with it."

Cherry, Davis' suitemate, recalled that when he last spoke to Davis, "he said that he wasn't quite done, but that he knew he could finish on time. I didn't get the sense that anything was wrong, but Manzili was a pretty reserved person and somewhat difficult to read."

Director of Psychological and Counseling Services John Kolligian said in an interview that it is often difficult to help individuals who don't openly express their emotions.

"When someone is low-key and private but in some way suffering enormously in great privacy, all you can do is just try to check in with that person and get some sort of a sense, and go with your gut, go with your intuition about how much pain someone is in," he said. "But it's a very imprecise art."

The last reported student death by suicide was in September 2004.