The mother and wife of Titan submersible victims Suleman and Shahzada Dawood has opened up about her loss in a new interview with the BBC.
Christine Dawood and her 17-year-old daughter Alina were on board the host ship in the North Atlantic as their two family members boarded OceanGate’s submersible to dive nearly 13,000 feet to view the sunken Titanic.
The submersible lost contact with the surface ship an hour and 45 minutes into the dive. Following a desperate, dayslong search, authorities determined the vessel had imploded, killing all five men on board.
Speaking to the BBC in her first interview, Christine Dawood recalled her final moments with her husband and son aboard the host vessel.
“We just talked and joked, actually, because Shahzada was so excited to go down. He was like a little child,” she said. “They were both so excited.”
(Her comments about her son contradict those from her sister-in-law Azmeh Dawood, who told NBC News last week that Suleman was terrified and “wasn’t very up for” the expedition.)
Christine Dawood also recounted how the hours and days unfolded after the submersible lost communications.
“I was sitting with people talking,” she recalled. “And then somebody came down and said, ‘We lost comms,’ and I think I didn’t comprehend at that moment what that meant.”
“It just went downhill from there,” she added.
Throughout the first day, she said she was told the Titan would “come back up.”
As the time passed when the Titan should have resurfaced, she said, they held hope that the vessel’s pilot could drop weights or employ other measures to return.
“We were like, constantly looking at the surface,” she said. “And so there was that hope.”
Dawood said she lost hope “when we passed the 96-hour mark,” which meant the passengers would likely have exhausted the breathable oxygen supply on the Titan if they had been still alive.
Suleman Dawood had just completed his first year as a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His friends and family members said he was passionate about solving Rubik’s cubes, science fiction and travel.
Shahzada Dawood was the vice chair of Engro, a Pakistani energy investment company. He lived in the UK with his wife and daughter Alina.
Christine Dawood said her son could solve a Rubik’s cube in a matter of seconds and had taken one with him on the dive so he could solve it thousands of feet underwater at the Titanic site.
She said she and Alina have decided to learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube in memory of Suleman.
“That’s going to be a challenge for us because we are really bad at it,” she told BBC. “We promised ourselves we’re gonna learn it for Suleman.”
The other passengers on board the Titan were OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, wealthy British businessperson Hamish Harding and French deep sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The US Coast Guard said Sunday it had launched an investigation into the disaster. Civil or criminal sanctions could be recommended, a Coast Guard official said in a news conference.