Dāhir Shadīd Abī Shadīd was a passenger on the Titanic.
Dāhir Shadīd Abī Shadīd must have been born in 1893 in Ebrine in Northern Syria (now North Lebanon).
His mother had emigrated to the United States at an unknown time. When Dāhir was 19, he still lived in Ebrine and had gotten himself in a situation. He had committed a terrible deed, unintentially as he was irresponsibly toying with a gun, which set off and killed a girl. He fleed after fearing repercussions, as he knew that the family would want revenge for the death of their daughter.
The police went after him but he hid in some lake. With the help of his uncle, who had sent him money from Pennsylvania, he made it to France. The idea was that he would stay with his mother in the USA. He sneaked out of the country in the middle of the night and took a divergent route to France, leaving from the port of Selaata, North of Batroun in the middle of the night to land in Cyprus, form where he went to Marseilles and later bought a Third Class ticket for Titanic after inspection was carried out, which he passed. Then he had to go further north.
Titanic[]
He got onboard the ship in Cherbourg and left the French mainland on the evening of April 10.
On the late night of April 14, Titanic met her tragic fate as she was approaching an iceberg at speed but it was not visible until she was too close to avoid it. The starboard side of the ship brushed against the hard mass after turning to port which wasn’t enough to stop a collision. Water poured through the small cracks that appeared in the hull underneath the waterline. The ship starting to flood rapidly.
After midnight on April 15, the captain declared that the passengers needed to be evacuated as investigation of the damage turned out that the ship would founder.
It is unknown what happened to Shadīd, but one story goes that he jumped off the ship. Despite trying to escape the consequences of his very inane actions, he was caught up by fate, becoming a victim in the Titanic disaster after she sank at 2:20 A.M.
His body was recovered by the CS Mackay–Bennett and they believed he was from the South of France or an Italian. He was the ninth body to be found. Later identified, his body was sent to Halifax in Nova Scotia first, then to Mount Carmel in Pennsylvania where Abī Shadīd was laid to rest on May 4th 1912.