'Their remains came as slush in shoeboxes', claims widow and grieving wife of husband and son who died in Titan sub disaster
Christine Dawood waited months for her dead loved ones' remains to be returned following the catastrophic implosion.
A grieving wife and mother whose husband and son died aboard the OceanGate Titan submersible has claimed she received their remains as “slush” in “two small boxes” an agonising nine months after the tragedy.
Listen to this article
Shahzada Dawood, 48, and Suleman Dawood, 19, were among the five passengers killed when the privately owned submarine imploded during an attempted visit to the ruins of the Titanic in 2023.
Three years on, Christine Dawood has shared details of her painful experience waiting for their remains in the months following the disaster.
“We didn’t get the bodies for nine months,' she said.
“Well, when I say bodies, I mean the slush that was left. They came in two small boxes, like shoeboxes.”
Mrs Dawood added that there "wasn't much” that the US Coast Guard could find when salvaging their remains from the seabed before separating them and subjecting them to DNA testing.
“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,” she told the Guardian.
Mrs Dawood, a trained psychologist, has written a book about her experience, combining her first-hand account of the unfolding disaster with family memories spanning two decades.
She lives in Surrey with her daughter, 20, and wants her kept out of the spotlight as she doesn’t “want her to be known as that girl who lost her father and brother on the Titan”.
The Dawood family had become fascinated with the Titanic after visiting an exhibition in Singapore in 2012.
A huge 9,090-piece Lego model of the Titanic Suleman spent hours building remains the centrepiece of her kitchen in Mrs Dawood’s Surrey home. “I have learned to give the grief attention,” she said, adding: “So I go into Suleman’s room. Sometimes I find the cat sleeping on his pillow, and I sit on the bed and let the grief come.
British explorer Hamish Harding, 58, French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet (known as “Mr Titanic”), 77, OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rushton, 61, were also among the victims of the disaster.
The world watched after the US Coast Guard announced that the passengers had 70-96 hours left before they ran out of oxygen.
The vessel was descending 12,400ft, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, in the North Atlantic Ocean.But the wreckage, at 3,776 metres below the waves, was eventually found lying in the seabed with no survivors.
An inquiry found that the structural integrity and design of the sub led to issues, while former OceanGate employees revealed the company was committed only to profit making and “very little in the way of science”.
The report also said OceanGate had a "toxic workplace environment" and used the "looming threat of being fired" to prevent staff from coming forward with safety concerns.
“From the beginning, I had a lot of reasons to hate Stockton, but does that really help me?” Mrs Dawood said.
She added: “He died with them. If I’m angry with him, I’m giving him power, and I refuse to do that. I’m sure people will say I’m naive, but if I start to analyse every single thing, where does that lead me?”Her book, Ninety-Six Hours, is published by Whitefox on 12 May.