The wife of one of the men to die in the Titan submarine disaster has blamed ‘ego and arrogance’ for the deaths of her husband and son.
Christine Dawood lost her billionaire British-Pakistani husband Shahzada, 48, and son Suleman, 19, on board the Oceangate vessel on a tour of the Titanic wreck in June 2023.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, 61, British businessman Hamish Harding, 58, and former French navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, also died when the submarine imploded almost 4km under the sea, instantly killing everyone on board.
Now Ms Dawood, who was born in Germany but is from Surrey, is calling for proper regulation of the sector after concerns were raised about the safety of the vessel in the first place.
Criticising Stockton, who she said enticed her Titantic-obsessed husband and son on the $250,000-per-head trip, she told the BBC: ‘I guess the American way of talking and presenting themselves is very different to ours, so I just thought they are a lot more egocentric.
‘I mean, there is a lot of, ‘we are awesome,’ and the American dream, and, ‘we can do it.’
Ms Dawood has been left horrified by the ongoing two-year investigation into the tragedy, questioning how OceanGate were able to operate after safety were flagged multiple times.
‘I wanted to hear the confidence of the person who built it, who ran the company, but also he surrounded himself with literal experts. I mean, one died with them. If you have an expert like this with you, I mean, you don’t doubt.’
Father and son Shahzada Dawood, 48, (right) and Sulaiman Dawood, 19, (left) were killed in the implosion of the OceanGate vessel in June 2023
Christine Dawood was left shocked by the US coastguard’s investigation and now blames ‘ego’ and ‘arrogance’ for the deaths of her husband and son
OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded in the Atlantic Ocean in June 2023
She continued: ‘The arrogance of the people in charge when they think that they’re above everything. That really gets to me.
‘Why is ego and arrogance more important than safety? The irony is not lost on me that the Titanic sunk for exactly the same reasons.’
It is believed the vessel imploded around 90 minutes into its descent with its wreckage later found 330 yards away from the bow of the ship.
The submersible suddenly lost contact with its support vessel, Polar Prince, after just about an hour and 45 minutes into the two-and-a-half hour descent.
One of the last messages from the crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, ‘all good here,’ according to a visual re-creation presented at a Coast Guard hearing last year.
But the loss of contact sparked an international manhunt to track down the missing vessel which had plunged 12,400ft – more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon – under the North Atlantic ocean.
Eventually, however, the wreckage of the ship was found on the ocean floor about 330 yards off the bow of the Titanic, with Coast Guard officials reporting that no one on board survived.
Ms Dawood told how there was some comfort in learning that the submarine had imploded, as it meant her husband and son did not suffer as they would have been killed instantly.
Among those onboard the doomed vessel were OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush
Also killed in the tragedy were Paul-Henri Nargeolet (left) and adventurer Hamish Harding (right)
And she is currently part-way through a challenge to honour her son’s death, by walking 800km from Surrey to Glasgow.
Following the tragedy, questions emerged about the safety of the submersible, which had been making voyages to the Titanic wreckage site going back to 2021.
It was later revealed that the vessel was being operated by a video game controller, and leaders in the field of deep-sea exploration had even warned Mr Rush five years earlier that the company’s ‘experimental’ methods could end in ‘catastrophic’ disaster.
Others inside the company also expressed concerns, including David Lochridge, who worked as the Titan project’s director of marine operations.
He had demanded more rigorous safety checks on the sub – including ‘testing to prove its integrity’.
Lochridge also wanted the company to carry out a scan of Titan’s hull to ‘detect potential flaws’ rather than ‘relying on acoustic monitoring’ – which would only detect an issue ‘milliseconds before an implosion’.
But he was unceremoniously booted from the company in the aftermath, as Rush continually brushed off the concerns.
He even suggested at one point that questions about the Titan’s safety credentials was ‘personally insulting’ and he branded claims he was ‘going to kill someone’ as ‘baseless.’
New footage released by the US Coastguard shows Wendy Rush, the wife of Stockton Rush, trying to contact the doomed crew during their descent to the wreck of the Titanic
The wreckage of the submersible was ultimately located on the ocean floor about 330 yards off the bow of the Titanic
Rush went as far as saying he was ‘tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation’ as he appeared resentful of the ‘obscenely safe’ regulations he viewed as an obstacle to development and innovation.
He, too, died in the incident.
By September last year, the US Coastguard conducted public hearings to grill company executives on what may have gone wrong.
At the hearing, Karl Stanley, a submersible pilot and designer of the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration, claimed Rush was more concerned with leaving ‘his mark on history’ than keeping his passengers safe.
‘He knew that eventually it was going to end like this, and he wasn’t going to be held accountable,’ Stanley testified.
‘But he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives.’
Stanley went on to say he had tried to flag safety concerns he noticed during a test drive in April 2019, including cracking noises and issues with drop weights. He emailed Rush, who dismissed the concerns.
‘I felt also, this exchange of emails strained our relationship from what it had been previously,’ he said. ‘I felt like I pushed things as far as I could without him telling me to shut up and never talk to him again.’
And this week new footage released by the US Coastguard shows Wendy Rush, the wife of Stockton Rush, trying to contact the doomed crew during their descent to the wreck of the Titanic.
Mrs Rush, who was monitoring the sub’s progress from a support ship, can be seen reacting to a noise that sounded like a ‘door slamming’.
She then turns to a team member sitting behind her and asks ‘what was that bang?’
Moments later Mrs Rush, who was a director of OceanGate with her husband, received a text message saying the sub had dropped two weights.
While she initially assumed this meant the dive was proceeding as planned, investigators now believe the ‘bang’ she heard was the moment the sub imploded.
It is thought the message she received was in fact sent just before the tragedy with its arrival being delayed due to the sound of the implosion.
OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after the implosion. The company has no full-time employees currently, but was represented by an attorney during the hearing.
The company said it has been fully co-operating with the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board investigations since they began.
