(Picture: AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
A grieving mother said her husband and son killed in the Titan sub disaster, were given back to her as ‘slush in two small boxes’.
Shahzada Dawood, 48, was killed on the dive with his 19-year-old son Suleman as the doomed OceanGate vessel tried to reach the Titanic wreck on June 18, 2023.
All five passengers – CEO Stockton Rush, UK billionaire Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul Henry Nargeolet and Mr Darwood and his son were killed ‘instantaneously’ when the sub imploded.
Now Christine Dawood has spoken of the agonising nine-month wait for the ‘bodies’ of her family to be returned from the Atlantic seabed.
‘Well, when I say bodies, I mean the slush that was left,’ she told The Guardian.
‘They came in two small boxes, like shoeboxes’.
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The slush is the remains that were recovered from the seabed, which were separated and DNA tested by the US Coast Guard.
‘There wasn’t much they could find,’ she says.
‘They have a big pile they can’t separate, all mixed DNA, and they asked if I wanted some of that, too. But I said no, just what you know is Suleman and Shahzada.’
Mrs Dawood told the paper she still has her son’s 9,090-piece Lego model of the Titanic built over two weeks on display in her kitchen.
‘People are always a bit shocked to see it,’ she says.
‘But what was I going to do? Break it up? Hide it away? Suleman put all those hours in. He’d been fascinated with the Titanic since we went to a huge exhibition when we lived in Singapore.’
Researchers into the disaster realised the sub must have collapsed inwards within a fraction of a second, killing all five men instantaneously.
On hearing the update, Mrs Darwood, who has written a book about her heartbreak, said: ‘My first thought was, “Thank God”…
‘I knew Shahzada and Suleman didn’t even know about it. One moment they were there and the next they weren’t.
‘Knowing they didn’t suffer has been so important. They’re gone, but the way they went does somehow make it easier.’
Since the disaster, Oceangate has suspended its operations and currently has no full-time employees.
Titan report critical of Stockton Rush
A National Transportation Safety Board report states that the faulty engineering of the Titan ‘resulted in the construction of a carbon fiber composite pressure vessel that contained multiple anomalies and failed to meet necessary strength and durability requirements.’
It also stated that OceanGate, the owner of the Titan, failed to adequately test the Titan and was unaware of its true durability.
Eight ‘primary causal factors’ that led to the implosion were identified in the 335-page report, which also criticised OceanGate’s ‘toxic workplace environment’ and ‘disturbing pattern of misrepresentation and reckless disregard for safety’.
The Titan sub was continually used despite ‘a series of incidents that compromised the integrity of the hull and other critical components’.
The sub was made of carbon fibre, which an expert told Metro had ‘never been’ an appropriate material to build deep water submarines, because it gets weaker with every dive.
OceanGate’s former director of engineering said the first hull used on the Titan was akin to a ‘high school project’, the US Coast Guard said.riminal offences’ in the case of Mr Rush, saying he had ‘exhibited negligence that contributed to the deaths of four individuals’ and may have been accused of ‘misconduct or neglect of ship officers’ had he survived the incident.
This offence carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years in the US.