Father and son who pulled out of Titan trip ‘haunted’ by doomed duo who replaced them
A Las Vegas investor turned down a pair of tickets to the doomed Titan submersible trip for himself and his son over safety concerns — and revealed to The Post that he’s now “haunted” by photos of the late father-son duo that took their place.
Jay Bloom said he and his 20-year-old son were in talks with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush to purchase two seats on the five-person Titan vessel — which made a fatal, headline-grabbing foray to the Titanic shipwreck last week — after the two were connected through a mutual friend.
Rush offered Bloom a “last-minute price” of $150,000 per person — a discount from the full price $250,000-a-seat price — but Bloom said he ended up turning down the deal over safety concerns.
The seats then went to one of Pakistan’s wealthiest men, 48-year old billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman.
“This is all over the news, and I’m seeing three pictures of individuals and the fourth picture of a father and son,” Bloom said in an interview with The Post.
“When I look at that picture of the father and son, it’s eerily similar to the pictures I have with my son,” Bloom added. “Very haunting.”
Dawood and his son died in the Titan’s “catastrophic implosion” that also claimed the lives of Rush, 61, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
“It’s really weird,” Bloom said of seeing pictures of the late father and son smiling together all over the news.
“One decision, that would have been our picture,” he added.
Since it was revealed that the five passengers died two days after the sub set off from St. John’s on the coast of Newfoundland, a grim Bloom told The Post that he’s been thinking about how “tomorrow is never promised.”
Bloom recalled Rush pitching the Titan’s mission to the Titanic. He said he was enticed by the trip when Rush said “less than 200 people have been to the dive site. More people have been to space than down to the Titanic.”
“Initially, there was a lot of excitement about the opportunity,” Bloom said, noting that his son has been “a huge fan of the Titanic and its story ever since he was a little kid.”
“I thought it was an amazing opportunity to give him a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said.
But, “as we got more serious about it, we started to learn more things and it was not such a good idea,” he added, citing Rush’s mindset “that his industry is extremely overengineered and in the name of safety, a lot of money is being wasted.”
Bloom was alarmed to hear that the Titan sub’s observation window — a porthole-style window that up to two people could look out of at one time — was only approved to reach depths of about 4,900 feet, according to its manufacturer.
However, the Titanic wreck lies on the ocean floor, at a depth of 12,500 feet.
Bloom said that Rush refused to get the observation window’s material weighted to reach that far below the surface because it was “too expensive.”
“That’s how he approached everything,” Bloom said.
Bloom also noted that “there’s no training, you just climb through the hatch and get in.”
He continued: “You can take risks, but they should be calculated risks. Stockton — the more I learned — was just reckless.”
“Any facts that came in — no matter how outlandish — if they supported his [Rush’s] position, he accepted them as true. Other facts that came in — no mater how credible — if they refuted his position, he rejected them as someone else’s position and they’re wrong,” Bloom added.
It has been revealed that Rush did just that after OceanGate consultant Rob McCallum told his boss he was putting the lives of his clients at risk by not having Titan certified by third parties.
Rush dismissed the warnings as “baseless cries” and a “personal insult.”
“I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic,” McCallum wrote to to Rush in March 2018. “In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: ‘She is unsinkable.’”
Rush shot back at McCallum: “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”
