A friend of the co-founder of OceanGate told a U.S. Coast Guard panel this week that he knew the doomed Titan submersible would kill him eventually, but he still moved forward with it because he knew he wouldn’t be held accountable for the actions.
On Tuesday, Karl Stanley, who works for the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration, made those comments about Stockton Rush, the CEO and co-founder of OceanGate. The vessel, which was going to the bottom of the ocean to explore the sunken Titanic ship with others on board, imploded in June of 2023.
All five people who were on the ship, including Rush, were killed when the vessel imploded as it was making its way to the Titanic site. The vessel imploded only two hours after it first left to make its descent.
Stanley, who was Rush’s long-time friend, testified to the Coast Guard this week:
“He knew that eventually it was going to end like this, and he wasn’t going to be held accountable. But, he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives.”
Rush is a descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Stanley is an expert in submersibles and had known Rush for the last decade. He testified that, during a test sea dive for a prototype of the Titan in April of 2019, he heard various cracking sounds. They also experienced other issues such as drop weights during the test run in the Bahamas.
Stanley said he emailed Rush about the concerns he had but that Rush brushed him off. As he testified:
“I felt also, this exchange of emails strained our relationship from what it had been previously. I felt like I pushed things as far as I could without him telling me to shut up and never talk to him again.”
Stanley said Rush wanted to “leave his mark on history,” and that’s likely why he ignored some of the key problems that the submersible had. At the end of the hearing Tuesday, Stanley added:
“The definition of an accident is something that happened unexpectedly and by sheer chance. There was nothing unexpected about this. This was expected by everybody that had access to a little bit of information.
“And I think that if it wasn’t an accident, it then has to be some degree of a crime. And if it’s a crime, I think to truly understand it, you need to understand the criminal’s motive. The entire reason this whole operation started was Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history.”
OceanGate’s director of administration, Amber Bay, said their company wouldn’t “conduct dives that would be risky just to meet a need.” At the same time, she did say the company was hoping to deliver for the people who paid the $250,000 to make the dive.
As she told the panel at the Coast Guard:
“There definitely was an urgency to deliver on what we had offered and a dedication and perseverance towards that goal.”
