The young man's aunt says he went along for the ride with his dad because the trip fell on Father's Day weekend.
The youngest victim of the Titan tragedy, 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, allegedly had some strong reservations about the trip before its fatal voyage.
According to his aunt Azmeh Dawood — who had fallen out of touch with her brother, fellow victim Shahzada Dawood, in recent years but stayed in contact with her nephew — told NBC News Suleman told another relative he “wasn’t very up for” the dive and was “terrified” about the trip.
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She said he wound up boarding the OceanGate submersible because he was “eager to please his dad” — who was a passionate Titanic fan — and the voyage happened over Father’s Day.
“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath … It’s been crippling, to be honest,” Azmeh said on Thursday before the deaths of her brother and nephew were confirmed.
After their deaths were later confirmed by the Coast Guard and OceanGate, she said she felt “disbelief” over the “unreal situation.” Azmeh added, “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.”
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Years before the Titan trip, Shahzada and his wife Christine survived another terrifying ordeal aboard a plan that suddenly “took a deep plunge.”
In a 2019 blog post, Christine recalled the frightening incident , saying that after the initial drop “the whole cabin let out one simultaneous cry, which turned to a whimper and then silence,” before another plunge.
“My husband told me later that he was thinking of all the opportunities he’d missed and how much he still wanted to teach our children,” she said of Shahzada, before saying the skies “went dark” and “engulfed us, teased us and breathed fear into some and bravery into others.”
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“My husband faced me, our eyes locked and our hands interlinked. No words were needed. He was as scared as I was and yet we were together. ‘Until death do…’ No, don’t go there!” she continued, before they then touched down on the runway.
“We were safely on the ground and yet my throat felt as if a noose was tightly around it. I felt a squeeze of my hand and heard somebody talking to me, but I was frozen still,” she concluded. “It’s then that I realised that my life had changed and would never be the same again.”
On Thursday, the Coast Guard and OceanGate Expeditions confirmed the worst: the company’s CEO and sub pilot Stockton Rush, as well as passengers Shahzada Dawood, his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, adventurer and billionaire Hamish Harding, Titanic enthusiast and diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet all died aboard the vessel, which went missing shortly after its dive on Sunday.
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