Christine Dawood finally broke her silence after her husband Shahzada Dawood and her 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood both died in the Titan submarine implosion. Christine told the BBC that she was supposed to be on the underwater voyage to see the wreckage of the Titanic, before the original trip was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Then I stepped back and gave them space to set [Suleman] up, because he really wanted to go,” she revealed in the interview published June 26, four days after her husband and son were presumed dead following a “catastrophic implosion.” Christine explained that she “was really happy for them because both of them, they really wanted to do that for a very long time.”
Christine revealed that her teenage son loved Rubik’s Cubes and brought one on the sub to solve it. She said her and her daughter Alina, 17, were there to say goodbye to Shahzada and Suleman before they boarded the doomed Titan on Father’s Day. “We just hugged and joked actually, because Shahzada was so excited to go down, he was like a little child,” she said. “So the sentence, we lost comm, I think that will be a sentence I never want to hear in my life again.”
The Titan — which was carrying three other passengers, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush — lost communication early into the voyage on Sunday, June 18. In her interview with BBC, Christine said that she “lost hope” after 96 hours passed since her husband and son went missing. “That’s when I sent a message to my family on shore, ‘I’m preparing for the worse,’ ” Christine said. She added, “I miss them, I really, really miss them.”
Christine’s sister-in-law Azmeh Dawood spoke to NBC News about the doomed deep-sea voyage, and revealed that Suleman “wasn’t very up for it” and was “terrified” to visit the Titanic. She admitted to being devastated by news that the vessel had imploded, resulting in the deaths of her brother and nephew. “I feel disbelief,” Azmeh said in the interview. “It’s an unreal situation. If you gave me a million dollars, I would not have gotten into the Titan.”
Other family members of the deceased Titan passengers have released statements since the tragedy. Hamish Harding’s cousin, Kathleen Cosnett, slammed OceanGate, the company in charge of the mission, for waiting hours before reporting Titan’s disappearance. OceanGate released a statement about the tragedy and said it was “an extremely sad time for our dedicated employees who are exhausted and grieving deeply over this loss.”