A café owner who served OceanGate workers and its CEO Stockton Rush says locals are 'disheartened' that the sub became a meme

• Corie Reed says OceanGate staff are some of her regulars at her coffee shop, Seas the Day Cafe.
• Reed said locals were "very disheartened" by memes about the Titan submersible.

Corie Reed said she bought Seas the Day Cafe, a coffee shop based in Everett, Washington, that shares a building with OceanGate, more than a year ago. Since then, she said, the coffee shop has become a popular destination for staff at the submersible company.

Reed told Insider that she had also served OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — one of the five people believed to have died in a "catastrophic implosion" aboard the Titan submersible — several times in the past year and that many of her regular customers were OceanGate staffers.

The ocean-tourism company found itself at the center of a global news event after the company's submersible went missing Sunday during an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck. The craft lost communication with its surface vessel two hours into its descent. In the past week, search-and-rescue teams have scoured the area near the Titanic shipwreck in an attempt to find the submersible.

Five people, including a British-Pakistani multimillionaire and his 19-year-old son, were on board.

On Thursday, the US Coast Guard said debris from the ship had been discovered near the wreck of the Titanic. OceanGate told the press that the passengers had "sadly been lost."

"When I first heard about it, it was one of my employees who told me. A regular had seen it on the news," Reed said, referring to the news on Sunday night that OceanGate's Titan submersible was missing. "Our first reaction was panic, we started texting people we knew to see who was on it because we knew so many of them."

Reed said that her café had gotten more traffic from reporters in the past week and that locals had been abuzz with "rumors" about the submersible but that the town was hurting. The Port is well integrated with the town, supporting more than 40,000 jobs in the surrounding area and the OceanGate workers are a large part of Reed's clientele, as well as the town itself. The company employed about 47 people, according to April data from Pitchbook.

"I went into the café this morning and the atmosphere was very downtrodden," Reed said. "It's been the only topic of discussion for the last few days, and a lot of regulars are very disheartened by all the memes and jokes and things that are going around because these are people we know and talk to every day."

"There are a lot of jokes about them being millionaires, but they're also just people with families," she added.

The story of the missing submersible quickly went viral on social media in the past week — with some users even joking about the incident or ridiculing the passengers.

Reed said she hadn't seen Stockton or many OceanGate workers for weeks leading up to the recent excursion to the Titanic because they were preparing for the annual event — OceanGate's third venture to the shipwreck.

"This is a tragedy for all those people on that mothership that are waiting or have been waiting for them to return," she said. "They're away from their families too and it's taking a toll on them."