Friend of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush accuses him of murder

A friend of Stockton Rush has accused the CEO of murdering his clients by ‘designing a mouse trap for billionaires’.

Karl Stanley is a submarine operator and was one of the first people to set foot on Titan.

Mr Rush, the former CEO of OceanGate, was one of five men killed on the vessel after it imploded last month.

Speaking to 60 Minutes Australia, Mr Stanley said Mr Rush ‘definitely knew it was going to end like this’ as he recalled hearing concerning noises during his dive.

‘He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you could go out with,’ he said.

‘Who was the last person to murder two billionaires at once, and have them pay for the privilege?’

He suggested Mr Rush was willing to risk his own life and his clients’ lives in order to ‘go down in history’.

Mr Stanley recalled the moment he heard ‘loud gunshot-like noises’ during his descent on the Titan with Mr Rush in the Bahamas in 2019.

‘That’s a heck of a sound to hear when you’re that far under the ocean in a craft that has only been down that deep once before,’ Mr Stanley told 60 Minutes. 

He recalled telling Mr Rush about how he believed there was an area of the hull that was breaking down.

Mr Stanley alleges to have sent frantic emails to Mr Rush warning him about the hull and said he even ‘painted a picture of his wrecked sub at the bottom’.

But he says this was not enough to convince Mr Rush that the vessel was not safe.

Mr Stanley said the tragedy was both preventable and inevitable and has caused him to shift between feelings of grief and anger.

He said he has ‘no doubt’ the implosion was caused by the ‘the carbon fiber tube’ – the area he warned Mr Rush about.

Hamish Harding, 58, Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman Dawood, 19, Paul-Henry (PH) Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush all died on the submersible after it imploded in the middle of the Atlantic on June 18. 

They all started to descend as Mr Rush piloted the vessel. At 9.45am it lost contact with its mothership, the Polar Prince.

Kent Osmond, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said a team of investigators has been established with the ‘sole purpose’ of determining whether a criminal investigation would be warranted.

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