A teenager who died on the Titan submersible planned to film himself attempting a world record by solving a Rubik’s cube while 3,700 metres below sea level. Suleman Dawood, aged 19, perished alongside his father Shahzada, 48, and three other men on June 18 when their vessel imploded during a trip to see the wreckage of the Titanic which lies two miles beneath the waves on the ocean floor.
Speaking to the BBC, Suleman’s mother Christine Dawood, said that her son had bought a camera to capture the moment he would attempt a fastest time for tackling the famous puzzle cube.
She said she and her daughter Alina, 17, were on the support vessel for the Titan submersible, the Polar Prince, when communication was lost with the craft carrying her husband and son.
Heart-breakingly Mrs Dawood revealed Suleman had applied to Guinness World Records to register his record attempt which was supposed to happen deep below the surface of the North Atlantic.
Suleman, who was a student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, had previously been filmed completing a Rubik’s cube in an impressive 12 seconds.
The Titan submarine was lost on June 18, with the other men on board including British businessman Hamish Harding, 58, French navy driver Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 77, and the CEO of Ocean Gate, Stockton Rush, 61, the firm that owned the Titan.
Before his ill-fated journey on the sub, Mrs Dawood said her son had told her “I’m going to solve the Rubik’s cube 3,700 metres below sea at the Titanic”.
She said she hugged her husband and son before they boarded the submersible which was going to take them down to the famous wreck. Shahzada Dawood was a British businessman from one of Pakistan’s richest families.
Mrs Dawood said she and her daughter held out hope to begin with after the Titan did not initially return. She said: “We all thought they are just going to come up so that shock was delayed by about 10 hours or so.
“By the time they were supposed to be up again, 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 because we were hoping and… 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’. But there was a lot of hope.”
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.
She revealed that’s when she sent a message to her family saying she was ‘preparing for the worst.’ Her daughter held out a bit longer, she said, until the call with the US Coast Guard where they were informed debris had been found.
Despite an enormous rescue effort being launched to save the Titan sub, it emerged the craft suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’ near the wreck of the Titanic around the same time communication was lost, according to the US Coast Guard.
Had the vessel not been destroyed, it had enough oxygen on board to support life for 96 hours.
