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The 19-year-old passenger who died aboard the imploded submersible was “terrified” about taking the ill-fated trip to the Titanic — but decided to go along to please his dad, who was “absolutely obsessed” with the famed shipwreck, his aunt said.
Pakistani teen Sulaiman Dawood was hesitant about embarking on the OceanGate Expeditions Titan, which imploded and killed him this week alongside his tycoon father, Shahzada, 48, and three other intrepid explorers, his father’s older sister Azmeh Dawood told NBC News.
He told a relative he “wasn’t very up for it” and felt “terrified,” she said, but he ended up going because the voyage fell over Father’s Day weekend and he wanted to please his dad, a Titanic aficionado.
The Dawoods and the three others died on their way to the famed 1912 wreck some 12,500 feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface.
“I am thinking of Sulaiman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath … It’s been crippling, to be honest,” Azmeh told NBC News in a phone interview from Amsterdam, where she lives with her husband, Jonathan.
“I feel disbelief. It’s an unreal situation,” she said as she cried about the news that the vessel had suffered what was described as a “catastrophic implosion” and disintegrated in the depths.
Azmeh said she had been glued to the TV during the agonizing days of the search for the missing Titan, which went silent an hour and 45 minutes into its dive in the Atlantic.
“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. I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them,” she told the outlet.
“I never thought I would have an issue with drawing breath. It’s been unlike any experience I’ve ever had,” Azmeh added.
She anxiously waited for news as the sub’s 96-hour oxygen supply dwindled — not knowing yet that an implosion had already claimed the lives of her brother, nephew, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, famed Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, and OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, 61.
Azmeh said she had fallen out of touch with her brother in recent years and that he disapproved of her use of cannabis for multiple sclerosis, but added that she remained close to Sulaiman.
Despite her broken ties with Shahzada, she called her sibling her “baby brother,” saying, “I held him up when he was born.”
Azmeh recalled that he was “absolutely obsessed” with the Titanic from a young age and that they would constantly watch the 1958 British disaster docudrama “A Night to Remember” about the sunken White Star Line ship.
Despite their shared fascination with the Titanic, she said, she would not have gone on the dive to the wreck.
“If you gave me a million dollars, I would not have gotten into the Titan,” Azmeh told NBCNews.
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