Nick Cave released a statement on Monday (May 9) confirming the death of his son Jethro Lazenby.
“With much sadness, I can confirm that my son, Jethro, has passed away,” he shared with BBC News, adding, “We would be grateful for family privacy at this time.” BBC News reports that Lazenby was 30 years old.
As of press time, details haven’t been made public about Jethro’s death, but he reportedly spent a stint in an Australian jail recently following a domestic dispute that ended with him violently attacking his mother, former model Beau Lazenby. According to Melbourne newspaper The Herald Sun, the embattled younger Lazenby was released from jail on Thursday (May 5), just days before his death.
In a February 2008 interview with The Guardian, Cave opened up about his relationship with his second son, whom he didn’t meet until seven or eight years after his 1991 birth. “To my eternal regret, I didn’t make much contact with Jethro in the early years, but I now have a great relationship with him,” the Bad Seeds frontman said at the time. In his teens and 20s, Lazenby dabbled in modeling and acting, appearing in 2007’s Corroboree and 2011’s My Little Princess.
Devastatingly, Lazenby is the second child of Cave’s to die, following the 2015 death of his then-15-year-old son Arthur after the teenager fell from a cliff near Brighton, England. The loss of the boy, who has a twin brother named Earl, hung heavy over the creative output of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in the years that came after, inspiring much of 2016’s Skeleton Tree and its 2019 follow-up Ghosteen, as well as the 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling.