Australian singer Nick Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur Cave, died Tuesday after falling off a 60-foot cliff in Brighton, England.
“Our son Arthur died on Tuesday evening. He was our beautiful, happy, loving boy. We ask that we be given the privacy our family needs to grieve at this difficult time,” Cave and wife
Susie Bick said in a statement, according to Rolling Stone.
The Guardian reported from a Sussex police representative that the teen suffered fatal injuries after falling 60 feet off the chalk cliff onto the underpass of Ovingdean Gap.
Members of the public found Cave and provided first aid before he was airlifted to the Royal Sussex country hospital in Brighton just before 6 p.m. He later died of his injuries there.
“Newhaven coastguard were called by Sussex police to attend a report of a child who had fallen from the top of the cliff,” a HM Costguard spokesman said, according to the British news site.
The details of the fall are unknown. The cliff is mostly protected by fencing.
“I'm not sure what Arthur was doing at the time, I have no idea how he would
have fallen,” Cave’s best friend Ed Bucknall told The Argus.
The fall is not being investigated as suspicious, according to The Guardian.
His friends and family visited the spot where Cave fell Wednesday, The Argus reported, bringing flowers and tributes in his memory.
“I saw him every day and I can't believe what's happened. I was with him in the morning,” Bucknall said. “He was one of the nicest guys you could meet, he was so funny and just so much fun. He never said a bad word about anyone.”
Bucknall and other friends expressed Cave’s love for skating and how he was a good friends and nice person.
Cave and his twin brother Earl Cave appeared in “20,000 Days on Earth,” which followed their Bad Seeds singer father over the course of a day in a semi-fictional documentary.
The twins recently finished 10th grade at St. Bede’s school in Hailsham, East Sussex. They had starred in the school’s production of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” with Cave as the villainous sidekick Borachio.
The school’s website said Cave “played with panache,” according to The Guardian.