Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old who died aboard OceanGate’s Titan submersible last week, hoped to set the world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube in the deep ocean, his mother said Monday.
Dawood and his father, Shahzada, had finished the process of applying to the Guinness World Records and entered the submersible equipped with a camera to record the achievement. Christine Dawood and her daughter remained aboard the Polar Prince mother ship while the submersible descended toward the wreck of the Titanic earlier this month, she told the BBC in an interview.
Christine spoke of the moment the crew of the Prince informed her they had lost communications with the submersible.
“I didn’t comprehend at that moment what it meant – and then it just went downhill from there,” she said.
COAST GUARD CONFIRMS ‘DEBRIS FIELD’ IS OF MISSING TITAN SUB
Inset, from left to right; Suleman Dawood, Shahzada Dawood, Stockton Rush; Paul-Henry Nargeolet and Hamish Harding were aboard the OceanGate Titan submersible. (Engro Corp. | Reuters/Shannon Stapleton | @OceanGateExped/Twitter | Felix Kunze/Blue Origin via AP | Ocean Gate/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Suleman and Shahzada were among the five passengers who perished when OceanGate’s submersible suffered a catastrophic implosion roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes into their descent toward the Titanic. The others included U.K. billionaire Hamish Harding, French mariner Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.
MISSING TITAN SUBMERSIBLE FOUND: SEE THE KEY VESSELS THAT AIDED THE DESPERATE SEARCH
Three days of searching ultimately uncovered a debris field “consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” near the wreck of the Titanic.