Mother of teenager who died on Titan sub said she gave her place to son

Christine Dawood said Suleman, 19, was ‘so excited’ and planned to break a Rubik’s cube world record

The mother of the teenager who died on the Titan submersible has said she gave up her place to her son “because he really wanted to go”.

Suleman Dawood, 19, and his father Shahzada, 48, were among five people who died when the vessel imploded on a journey to view the wreck of the Titanic.

Christine Dawood told the BBC the original trip had been scheduled before the pandemic and said her son had been disappointed that he was not old enough to accompany them.

She said: “It was supposed to be Shahzada and I going down. I stepped back and gave the place to Suleman because he really wanted to go.”

Asked how she felt about the decision, she replied: “Let’s just skip that.”

She said “both of them were so excited” and her son had taken a Rubik’s Cube with him because he wanted to break a world record.

Dawood said her son loved the puzzle so much that he carried it with him everywhere and could solve it in 12 seconds. He planned to solve the puzzle 3,700m below sea by the remains of the Titanic.

The family boarded the Polar Prince, the sub’s support vessel, on 18 June – Father’s Day – anticipating the trip of a lifetime. Dawood and her 17-year-old daughter Alina were still onboard when word came through that communications with Titan had been lost.

She said: “We all thought they are just going to come up so that shock was delayed by about 10 hours or so. There was a time … when they were supposed to be up on the surface again and when that time passed, the real shock, not shock but the worry and the not so good feelings started.

“We had loads of hope, I think that was the only thing that got us through it … We talked about things that pilots can do like dropping weights, there were so many actions people on the sub can do in order to surface. We were constantly looking at the surface. There was so many things we would go through where we would think ‘it’s just slow right now, it’s slow right now’.”

She said she “lost hope” when 96 hours had passed since her husband and son boarded the submersible, which indicated they had run out of oxygen. At that point, she sent a message to her family saying she was “preparing for the worst”.

Her daughter remained hopeful until the call with the US Coast Guard when they were informed debris had been found, she said.

The family returned to St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, on Saturday, and on Sunday held a funeral prayer for Shahzada and Suleman.

Dawood said she and her daughter had vowed to learn to finish the Rubik’s Cube in Suleman’s honour and she intended to continue her husband’s philanthropic work.

She said: “He was involved in so many things, he helped so many people and I think Alina and I really want to continue that legacy and give him that platform.

“Alina and I said we are going learn how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. That’s going to be a challenge for us because we are really bad at it but we are going to learn it.”