TV producer Jenji Kohan and writer Christopher Noxon remembered their son Charlie Noxon, who died Tuesday in a Park City, Utah, skiing accident, as “questioning, irreverent, curious and kind,” calling his death at age 20 “an unfathomable tragedy.”
Kohan, who created Showtime’s Weeds and Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black, and Christopher Noxon, whose writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine and Salon, released the statement through Utah’s Summit County Sheriff’s Office. Read it below.
A junior at Columbia University – his mother’s alma mater – Charles “Charlie” Noxon, of Los Angeles, was on a holiday ski trip with his father and two siblings when he struck a sign while attempting a turn on an intermediate trail at the Park City Mountain Resort, according to the Sheriff’s Office. His family was at another location on the trail, and no one witnessed the accident.
Noxon was pronounced dead by emergency crews airlifting him to a nearby hospital, according to the resort located near the Sundance Film Festival.
His parents, who divorced last year, released the following statement today:
Our hearts are shattered. Our dear boy Charlie Noxon died on New Year’s Eve on a ski slope in Park City.
The cliches about moments like this are true, it turns out. The one about life forever changing in a split second, about the fact that we are all bound up in a web of love and loss, about the primacy of community in times of unfathomable tragedy.
Charlie was 20 years old and a junior at Columbia. He studied philosophy and economics and Chinese. He loved Bob Dylan, George Saunders and Hayou Miyazaki. He was questioning, irreverent, curious and kind.
There are no words. But words are what we’ve got right now, along with tears and hugs and massive quantities of baked goods and deli platters.
He was absolutely adored by his parents, Jenji Kohan and Christopher Noxon, and his siblings, Eliza and Oscar.
Charlie had a beautiful life of study and argument and travel and food and razzing and adventure and sweetness and most of all love. We cannot conceive of life without him.
Services will be held this Sunday Jan 5 with his rabbi Rabbi Sharon Brous in the community he called home, Temple Israel of Hollywood.
– Christopher Noxon & Jenji Kohan