In the living room of a Surrey home sits a Lego model of the Titanic almost one and a half metres long built from more than 9,000 bricks. A 19-year-old boy spent nearly two weeks constructing it. His mother cannot bring herself to take it apart. That boy was Suleman Dawood and he died on 18 June 2023 alongside his father Shahzada when the Titan submersible imploded 500 metres above the Titanic wreck during a dive to the ocean floor. Christine Dawood, wife and mother of the two men who died that day, is speaking publicly about what happened for the first time.In an extensive interview with the Guardian Christine described how she came to give up her own seat on the Titan so her son could make the dive with his father. Suleman had been fascinated with the Titanic since childhood. The trip felt like a chance to give him an experience he would never forget. She had no reason to believe it would cost him his life.The Dawood family came across the opportunity during the 2020 lockdown through Quintessentially, their personal travel agency. The cost was 500,000 US dollars for two seats. Shahzada was from one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families and the family could afford it. Christine said she researched the safety record of civilian submersibles and found no accidents. That was sufficient reassurance for her at the time.What she did not know was the full picture behind OceanGate and its founder Stockton Rush. Rush had never submitted the Titan for independent safety inspection or classification by any maritime authority. He had dismissed the process as too slow and said it stifled innovation. The submersible was not registered to carry passengers. There had been hundreds of technical issues during its previous seasons of operation and an unexplained explosive noise during an ascent in July 2022 that Rush never investigated. The Titan had also spent six months sitting uncovered in a car park in St John’s exposed to a Newfoundland winter before the 2023 expedition.None of this was shared with the Dawood family before they boarded. Christine watched her husband and son climb into a dinghy and speed away towards the Titan on the morning of 18 June. She waved. That was the last time she saw them. The submersible began its descent and approximately three hours later its carbon fibre hull failed catastrophically under the pressure of the deep ocean. It imploded in a fraction of a second. All five people onboard died instantly.Christine spent four days on the support vessel the Polar Prince not knowing whether her husband and son were alive or dead. She described the experience to the Guardian as being like watching an avalanche coming and having nowhere to go. She made a conscious choice to suppress the worst of her emotions. She told herself they were stuck rather than gone. The OceanGate crew maintained an atmosphere of denial throughout, continuing to suggest technical problems that Rush and the other experienced divers onboard could resolve.When a remotely operated vehicle finally reached the ocean floor on 22 June and transmitted footage showing the twisted wreckage of the Titan’s tail cone, Christine’s first reaction was relief. She said knowing that Shahzada and Suleman died instantaneously without suffering has been one of the things that has made the grief bearable. One moment they were there and the next they were not.The official US Coast Guard investigation later concluded the disaster was entirely preventable and resulted from inadequate engineering, insufficient testing and Rush’s reckless disregard for established safety standards. Had Rush survived he would have faced criminal proceedings.Christine told the Guardian she has chosen not to direct her energy towards anger at Rush. She said giving him power over her emotional state would not serve her. She said without that choice she would not have survived. She is now planning to establish a grief and trauma centre and recently walked from Hampton Court to her son’s university in Glasgow taking five weeks to complete the journey as a tribute to Suleman who had always wanted to make that walk himself.The remains of Shahzada and Suleman were recovered from the seabed nine months after the implosion and arrived in two small boxes. Christine keeps Suleman’s room exactly as he left it. Her husband’s study remains untouched.
