Andrae Ellis, 35, was a Black male whose life ended in Selma during a violent Thanksgiving weekend that left the city shaken. Local reporting said he was shot and killed outside Cheers Package Store in the 1200 block of Broad Street at around midnight Friday, and memorial reporting places his death on November 24, 2018, in Selma. The killing unfolded in the middle of a grim stretch of holiday violence, with police and prosecutors describing a city searching for answers after multiple shootings
over just a few days.
What emerges from the online record is the outline of a sudden, public killing rather than a full explanation. WAKA’s contemporaneous account placed Ellis outside the package store as Selma police worked the scene and tried to sort out what had happened. That same report said investigators were looking for suspects, a sign that in the immediate aftermath authorities did not have the case closed and were still chasing leads in a city already reeling from other bloodshed that holiday weekend.
As for who was responsible, the publicly accessible online reporting is thin and unresolved. The contemporaneous coverage said police were looking for suspects, but in the later online sources available through public news coverage and memorial references, no suspect was publicly identified in Ellis’s death and no arrest, charge, trial, or conviction connected to his killing was reported. The online trail, at least from those accessible sources, leaves his case standing more as an open wound in Selma’s record of violence than as a crime that was publicly brought to a courtroom ending.
