A family member of one of the passengers on board the doomed Titanic exploration submersible vehicle said that he didn’t want to go on the trip due to fears for his safety.
Azmeh Dawood said her nephew, 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, told a relative that he “wasn’t very up for it” but went anyway to make his father, Shazada Dawood, happy on Father’s Day. Shahzada Dawood was one of the richest men in Pakistan as the owner of the Dawood Hercules Corporation Limited, an investment company, with some estimates saying the businessman was worth hundreds of millions to billions.
“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath ... it’s been crippling, to be honest,” Azmeh Dawood told NBC News. “I feel disbelief,” she added, coming hours after the U.S. Coast Guard said that the submarine was destroyed in a “catastrophic implosion” about 1,600 feet from the sunken Titanic.
“I feel like I’ve been caught in a really bad film, with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you’re counting down to,” she said. “I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them.”
Earlier this week, officials reported the OceanGate Titan vehicle went missing after it embarked on a deep-sea trip to view the Titanic, which sunk more than 100 years ago in the North Atlantic Ocean. That triggered a desperate, multi-country search before U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger announced that all five members, including OceanGate’s co-founder Stockton Rush, likely perished in a catastrophic event. The cause hasn’t been determined.
“The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber. Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families,” Mauger told reporters in Boston on Tuesday afternoon. “On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families.”
According to Azmeh Dawood, her brother became “absolutely obsessed” with the story of the Titanic. He would often watch the 1958 movie, “A Night to Remember,” which portrays the sinking of the massive ship. He also went to museum exhibitions about the Titanic, she told NBC.
“He was my baby brother,” Azmeh Dawood told the outlet. “I held him up when he was born.”
The other people who died in the catastrophe this week were identified as British businessman Hamish Harding and Frenchman Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a leading Titanic expert.
Harding’s family said in a statement: “He was one of a kind and we adored him ... what he achieved in his lifetime was truly remarkable and if we can take any small consolation from this tragedy, it’s that we lost him doing what he loved.”
A longtime friend and colleague of Nargeolet told French media that he quickly feared the worst when contact was lost on Sunday.
“Unfortunately, I thought straight away of an implosion,” diver and retired underwater filmographer Christian Petron said on Friday to broadcaster France-Info. At the depths in which the submersible was operating, the pressure is intense and unforgiving, he noted.
The investigation into what happened was already underway and would continue in the area around Titanic where debris from the submersible was found, said Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.
“I know there are also a lot of questions about how, why, and when did this happen. Those are questions we will collect as much information as we can about now,” Mauger said, adding that it was a “complex case” that happened in a remote part of the ocean and involved people from several different countries.
The Titan launched at 6 a.m. Sunday, and was reported overdue Sunday afternoon about 435 miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Rescuers rushed ships, planes, and other equipment to the site of the disappearance.
Any sliver of hope that remained for finding the crew alive was wiped away early Thursday when the submersible’s 96-hour supply of air was expected to run out, and the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic.
