A NJ lawyer began shipwreck diving with her partner; after his death, she carried on

Image: Left/Jennifer Sellitti(credit: Joe Mazraani 2025)/Right/A diver splashing from D/V Tenacious during operations offshore ( credit: Jennifer Sellitti) Jennifer Sellitti is a New Jersey public defender by day and a shipwreck diver by choice. For more than a decade, she explored the North Atlantic's sunken vessels alongside her partner, Joe Mazraani, aboard their boat, D/V Tenacious, helping locate several long-lost wrecks off the Eastern Seaboard. After Mazraani died during a deep-sea dive in 2025, Sellitti took command of their company, Atlantic Wreck Salvage, continuing the dangerous search for lost ships that the two of them once shared.From the courtroom to deep sea: Jennifer Sellitti's path into shipwreck divingSellitti graduated from Boston University in 1996 and built a career as a criminal defence attorney and public defender in New Jersey. She had never gone diving until she met Joe Mazraani in 2015, a fellow criminal defence lawyer who had been wreck diving off the Northeast coast since the mid-1990s. Mazraani, who was born in Lebanon and immigrated to the United States at 15, introduced her to his obsession with the roughly 5,400 shipwrecks resting on the Atlantic's ...