Services will be Saturday for RB High student

By Elizabeth Marie Himchak

A funeral will be held Saturday for David Hu, a 17-year-old Rancho Bernardo High senior honor student who died after collapsing at home.

The Jan. 14 service will be at Maranatha Chapel, 10752 Coastwood Road in 4S Ranch. There will be a viewing at 1 p.m. followed by the service at 2 p.m. Burial will be private.

Hu was found early in the morning on Jan. 5 by his eighth-grader brother, Kevin, said Principal Paul Robinson. The family called 911 and the teen was rushed to Pomerado Hospital, where he died. A cause of death is not yet known.

That evening an estimated 250-300 Rancho Bernardo High students and others — including parents Jason and Yuqing Hu — gathered for a candlelight vigil on campus in Hu’s memory, Robinson said. The vigil was filled with tears and laughter, as Hu’s friends recalled their memories of him while comforting one another.

“He was very humble about his success,” Robinson said. “He knew how to make people laugh.”

Hu, who at the end of his junior year had earned a cumulative grade point average of 4.61 by taking 10 Advance Placement courses in his sophomore and junior years, was in line to be the Class of 2012’s valedictorian or salutatorian, Robinson said, adding Hu had recently learned he was accepted into MIT.

“He was one of the brightest students on campus and a great young man,” Robinson said. “It is a real tragedy.”

At RB High, Hu was a peer counselor, Academic League captain, Science Olympiad president and in quiz bowl. He qualified for the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad, was a U.S. Physics Olympiad semifinalist and in the U.S. Junior Mathematical Olympiad.

As a sophomore, Hu earned the top score in the California-Nevada-Hawaii region 2010 PhysicsBowl. According to a San Diego Math Circle press release, the honor was “made all the more remarkable because Hu found himself without a calculator at the competition and had to complete all the required calculations by hand.”

In October 2010, The College Board announced Hu was one of five Poway Unified students to earn a perfect score — 2400 — on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, an achievement received by less than 1 percent of all students nationally who take the SAT.

Last September, Hu was among 14 RB High seniors named as 2012 National Merit Scholarship semifinalists due to their performance on the PSAT taken in their junior year.

In the Dec. 22, 2011 issue of the Rancho Bernardo News Journal and Poway News Chieftain, Hu was featured in the Fraternity of Academic and Civic Excellence program, sponsored by the newspapers and Visual Photography. Students are selected by their schools for outstanding academics and community service.

In his profile, Hu said in his free time he enjoyed reading, playing chess and sleeping, and planned to study math or engineering in college.