Earlier this year, Los Angeles native and Milken Community Schools graduate Nick Kadner was a promising young executive producer enjoying life in New York City with his partner, costume designer Catharine Stuart, and their new baby. Then, on March 13, their 5-week-old son, Lucas Alexander Kadner, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
“The baby was perfect. He was [born] 7 pounds, a little boy, adorable, and the love of our lives and so forth. One morning, he just didn’t wake up, and apparently it was a SIDS death. The final toxicology report is not back on that, but it seems pretty straightforward,” Dr. Marshall Kadner, Nick’s father and Lucas’ grandfather, said in a phone interview.
SIDS is the leading cause of death among infants, claiming approximately 2,500 infants’ lives annually, according to kidshealth.org.
The tragedy, unfortunately, does not end with Lucas’ death. Soon after, Nick and Stuart, who had plans to marry, retreated to a cabin in upstate New York to get away. On the night of April 5, while Stuart was asleep, Nick got up to use the bathroom. In the morning, she found him there — he had died of a heart attack at the age of 32. Nick died less than one month after Lucas.
Nick’s funeral took place April 10 at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery, presided over by Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback. At the service, Marshall Kadner said, Nick’s friends from New York shared memories that provided him fresh insights into the life of his son — Nick had moved from Los Angeles at the age of 17 and came back to visit L.A. a few times each year.
“They are — were — very close and very helpful to each other in a lot of ways, some of which I didn’t even know about,” Kadner said
Lucas was both Kadner’s grandson and his patient: Kadner, an OB-GYN, delivered baby Lucas.
“He was supposed to be my last delivery. It all seemed so symmetrical. We were just ecstatically happy for about [five] weeks, and I guess that will just have to do,” he said.
Nick was born on Oct. 16, 1983, and grew up attending the Curtis School and Milken Community Schools. He’d always been a strong student, his father said.
At Milken, Nick was a videographer for the drama department and he liked to hang out in the music room. He also liked to drive around the canyons of the city with friends.
“Honestly, we spent most of our time driving around the hills listening to Tenacious D and acting out and being bad kids,” Juliana Harkavy, a 2003 Milken graduate and film and television actress (“The Walking Dead”), remembers of their high school days. “But anything Nick did or tried, any of his hobbies, he was good at everything. He could be good at everything.”
After graduation, he went on to New York University, from which he graduated in 2005 with a bachelor of fine arts. Nick went on to work on the creative end of the film and media business. He’d always been passionate about cinema, his father said, recalling how Nick, while still at Milken, enrolled in a film program for college students at UCLA.
“His mother would drive him. He was not old enough to drive himself, and she would drop him off two or three blocks away from the meeting place, so his classmates couldn’t see he couldn’t drive. … He introduced himself as a freshman, but he was a freshman in high school,” Kadner said.
The two deaths have triggered an outpouring of community support for Stuart, in particular through a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign created on April 9 by Erin Jacobs Mays, a friend of Stuart. To date, the campaign has raised more than $133,000 through contributions from more than 1,800 people. Money raised will help Stuart focus on healing without financial worries, Mays wrote in an email.
“This was a way to give her some freedom to focus on herself, in whatever way that might be. And the response to the campaign has shown that so many people not only care about and love Catharine, Nick and baby Luke, but that they can try to empathize with what she’s going through and see the value in supporting her through this horrendous time,” she said. “I think everyone just prays for her relief.”
