Poor preparation doomed Camp Mystic victims, investigator tells Texas lawmakers in harrowing account
By Emily Foxhall, The Texas Tribune
April 27, 2026
Asked by the Texas Legislature to investigate last summer’s deadly flood at Camp Mystic, Casey Garrett recounted the harrowing early-morning hours as the Guadalupe River surged through cabins and reached deadly heights.
Lawmakers at the Capitol hearing sat attentive Monday as Garrett methodically offered one of the most detailed accounts to date of the horrors of July 4 at the camp. Family members of campers and counselors who died, wearing now-familiar buttons showing their faces, passed tissues in the audience. Members of the Eastland family that ran the camp also looked on.
In some Camp Mystic cabins, Garrett told a joint hearing of House and Senate flood investigative committees, counselors rushed girls to the recreation hall, which had a second-floor balcony.
In other cabins, counselors passed girls through windows, piggy-backing the kids through the water to the safety of a nearby hill as lightning cut through the darkness and rain fell in sheets.
In still another cabin, a night security guard and a counselor pushed heavy trunks of girls’ belongings out a window even as they tried to keep girls from getting swept away. The water’s path kept changing. Flashing vehicle hazard lights lit the space that, unlike other cabins filling with water, had a vaulted ceiling, giving campers room to breathe.
“It’s madness,” Garrett told legislators. “It’s mayhem.”
Camp Mystic hadn’t prepared counselors and staff with adequate emergency training, an evacuation plan or emergency preparedness supplies such as life jackets or ladders, Garrett said. Counselors performed “heroic actions,” she said — but did not execute a safe evacuation plan because there was none.
As a result, Garrett concluded, neither grown adults nor college-age counselors had the preparation or organization to take advantage of the time they had to get girls out of cabins safely after the National Weather Service pushed out the first flood warning.
The investigator offered some new details on what happened that morning, on top of extensive testimony that’s already been shared in an Austin courtroom and lawsuits, and Garrett’s even-handed, concise presentation packed a punch as she reviewed beat-by-beat the flood that killed 25 campers, two counselors and the camp’s executive director.
In the harried evacuation, campers got temporarily separated on the hillside from counselors, Garrett said. At least one lost hold of a counselor’s hand and got swept away. One girl circled back for her sheet and was taken by the water.
“I saw her,” said Garrett, quoting a camper. “And then I didn’t.”
“The fate of those girls was set before any first drop of rain ever fell,” said Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock.
“There was no system”
The night of July 3 felt normal at Camp Mystic, Garrett said, describing a rustic site with a culture rooted in obedience and in legacy. There, Garrett said, girls learned to follow rules. Women from the same families attended generation after generation. Moms put daughters on a waiting list at birth.
Dick Eastland reigned as commander of the camp, Garrett explained — a man people knew not to cross, a man who ran the show. Counselors explained that they felt they would get in trouble with Eastland if they took girls into the lightning or ran to the camp office in the pouring rain, Garrett said.
Counselors on July 3 performed skits. With a flood watch in place, camp staff could have moved the campers to a safer portion of the property for a slumber party, Garrett proposed. But they didn’t. Taps played on the loudspeakers.
Eastland — who Garrett said well knew the threat that flash floods could bring — monitored the weather.
The hours proceeded. About 30 minutes after the weather service warned of life-threatening flash flooding, Eastland radioed a son about the heavy rainfall — 2 inches in an hour — saying they needed to move equipment from the waterfront, a common first step if it was flooding.
Counselors in their pajamas ran in the dark and in the rain to ask for help because water had begun pouring into some cabins.
“Now things are starting to ramp up a little bit,” Garrett recounted.
Eastland acted as if he were waiting for the right moment to push a big red emergency button but waited too long, in Garrett’s opinion.(Legislators in a special session passed measures last year after the flood to implement new safety rules for youth camps — including taking action to evacuate flood-prone camps as soon as a flash flood warning is issued.)
Not until 3 a.m did Eastland radio to evacuate a cabin the counselors had told him about. But he and his son, Edward, didn’t round up all available adults on that side of camp — which included groundskeepers, nurses and another of Eastland’s sons who appeared not to know what was happening, Garrett noted. The investigator and her team found no evidence of staff trying to use the same speaker system that had played Taps.
Three adults instead worked piecemeal, moving girls out of a few cabins at a time. In doing so, they missed a critical opportunity to direct girls to walk a short distance to safety. Some buildings had second stories, including the recreation hall, which ended up filled with 95 campers who had to go to the bathroom out the window, and water rising so high counselors started brainstorming what to do if they had to get out.
“There was no system,” Garrett emphasized.
Some of the camp’s youngest and neediest campers remained in their cabins, supervised by first-time counselors. Importantly, many cabins only had two counselors instead of the historically typical three, Garrett said.
Eastland radioed directions to evacuate those youngest girls from three cabins, including Bubble Inn, according to Garrett’s timeline.
“This loss of life was preventable”
Garrett displayed photos of the Bubble Inn campers. Each died in the Guadalupe River, she said, but what exactly happened remains a mystery. No one survived to be interviewed among the more than 140 people Garrett spoke with in recent months to prepare her testimony.
At least some of the girls wound up in Dick Eastland’s vehicle.
“I have Bubble Inn cabin in my car,” Eastland radioed. “I’m stuck against a tree. I need help.”
Edward, his son, replied: “Dad, I’m sorry. I can’t get to you.”
Eastland’s body was later found in his vehicle, along with the bodies of some of the girls.
Edward Eastland, meanwhile, couldn’t get the door to another cabin open and was desperately trying to find a way in from an attached cabin, giving directions to a trapped counselor through a vent. At some point, the outer door opened and the counselor started passing girls outside, ducking their heads under water to get them out.
One of the girls was found 6.5 miles down river — covered in ant bites but alive. Neighbors found two more surviving girls in a debris pile a mile away.
And still more girls from those cabins lived by clinging to a tree — which would collapse later that day as the last of them was rescued from it, Garrett said. Another survived by gripping a limestone column on a cabin, holding with her arms and legs like a monkey and even her chin, which she dug into the stone.
“This tragedy could have been prevented,” Sen. Pete Flores, a Republican from Pleasanton and chair of the Senate investigating committee, said in his opening remarks.
Garrett said the scope of her investigation was limited to events at Camp Mystic, though the flood killed more than 100 people when heavy rains caused the Guadalupe River to surge through homes, RV parks and youth camps in the middle of the night.
She urged lawmakers to take action and not let her work languish in a report.
Camp Mystic is planning to welcome campers back this summer to a portion of its property that is separate from where the girls died. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, though, has repeatedly called on the state to deny the camp’s operating license. He reiterated that call in a social media post after the hearing on Monday, pointing to the testimony as evidence justifying withholding the camp’s license.
“No one wants to close Camp Mystic forever,” Patrick said. “Once you see and hear the evidence, I think you will clearly understand why I, along with the Heaven’s 27 families who lost their children, have called on DSHS to not renew Camp Mystic’s operators’ license until all investigations are complete later this year and Camp Mystic and its operators are determined to be fit to protect and care for children in their custody.”
The camp also faces multiple lawsuits from families and is being investigated by the state agency that licenses them and the Texas Rangers.
“This loss of life was preventable, and it is, it’s, I don’t know how to process that,” said Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso.
Moody went on: “I can’t even imagine how these families wake up every day.”
“It’s impossible to understand,” Garrett said.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.