A grief-stricken mom who lost both her husband and their teenage son in the doomed Titan submarine disaster has revealed their remains were eventually returned to her as “slush” in tiny “shoeboxes.”
Christine Dawood — whose husband, Shahzada, and their 19-year-old son, Sulaiman, were killed when their submarine imploded enroute to view to the Titanic wreckage back in 2023 — said she was forced to endure a painstaking wait to get what was left of their remains.
“We didn’t get the bodies for nine months,” she told the Guardian of the grim return.
“Well, when I say bodies, I mean the slush that was left. They came in two small boxes, like shoeboxes.”
Dawood, who was actually meant to be on the ill-fated submersible but gave up her spot for her son at the last minute, said the so-called slush was whatever investigators could recover from the sea floor and then separate via DNA testing.
“There wasn’t much they could find,” she said.
“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.”
Shahzada and Suleman were among the five people aboard the Titan submersible when it suddenly imploded en route to the famed wreck site at the bottom of the North Atlantic in June 2023.
The Titan submersible had set off the morning of June 18 but lost contact with its support vessel roughly two hours later.
Investigators determined that the debris later found on the ocean floor — roughly 984 feet from the Titanic — was consistent with a “catastrophic implosion.”
“My first thought was, thank God,” Dawood said. “When they said catastrophic, I knew Shahzada and Suleman didn’t even know about it. One moment they were there and the next they weren’t.”
“Knowing they didn’t suffer has been so important. They’re gone, but the way they went does somehow make it easier,” she added.
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