Families of Children Killed in Texas Floods Sue Camp Mystic, Claiming Gross Negligence

As torrential floodwaters roared through Camp Mystic in the first dark hours of July 4, top leaders at the all-girls retreat in Central Texas spent more than an hour securing the camp’s equipment instead of evacuating or even checking on campers, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday by the families of five campers and two counselors who died that night.

The suit, filed in a state court in Austin, Texas, names Camp Mystic and individual members of the Eastland family, who have owned and operated the Hill Country camp for generations, among the defendants. It portrays the family as overconfident and woefully underprepared for serious flooding, despite decades of experience and ample warnings.

The suit claims that Dick Eastland, the camp’s executive director, and his son Edward, a director, squandered a crucial window of time following the National Weather Service’s warning about “life threatening flash flooding” at 1:14 a.m. The leadership dismissed camp counselors’ early pleas for help, and then “made a hopeless ‘rescue’ effort from its self-created disaster” only when it was too late, the lawsuit says.

Two counselors and 25 young campers died at Camp Mystic that night, most of them from two cabins that housed the youngest girls. Dick Eastland, 70, also died. Other camps along the Guadalupe River had to evacuate and rescue campers from the flooding, but Camp Mystic was the only sleepaway camp where campers died.

“These young girls died because a for-profit camp put profit over safety,” the suit says.

Another lawsuit filed in the same court on Monday by the parents of Eloise Peck, 8, presents a similar description of inadequate emergency planning.

Eastland family members have said little publicly about their actions during the flood, and their lawyer, Mikal Watts, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

But Mr. Watts, who represents the family and the camp, discussed the events in late October in an appearance on CNN. He called the evacuation of the camp “orderly” and mostly successful.

Mr. Watts’s account broadly matched the timeline that is laid out in the lawsuit. He said Dick Eastland and the camp’s night security guard, Glenn Juenke, met in the camp’s office “within minutes” after the Weather Service issued its alert, and were later joined by Edward Eastland. They convened the camp’s grounds crew to secure equipment, and then “started coming up with a plan” around 2 a.m., Mr. Watts said.

Camp Mystic announced in September that it will reopen next summer for its 100th year of operation, using a nearby second campus that the camp opened in 2020. The older part of the camp complex, where the flooding and deaths occurred, will not be open to campers in 2026.

Many of the families of campers who died in the flooding objected to the reopening. They pointed out that the body of one camper, Cile Steward, was still unaccounted for, and they complained that they were given only a few hours’ notice before the announcement.

Texas passed a package of summer camp safety laws in September, a move championed by many of the parents of girls who died at Camp Mystic, who have banded together under the name “Heaven’s 27.” The Texas Legislature announced in October that it would conduct a formal investigation into the July flooding in the Hill Country, which killed more than 130 people along the Guadalupe River, including those at Camp Mystic.

“I was shocked to see Camp Mystic begin signing up campers for next year with so many questions unanswered about what happened that fateful morning,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement announcing the investigation.

The multifamily suit filed on Monday describes the camp leadership as eager to cut corners and preserve the illusion of safety, while building “true generational wealth” from the camp’s low overhead costs and millions of dollars in annual revenue.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency determined in 2011 that much of Camp Mystic lay within a 100-year flood zone, meaning there was a 1 percent chance in any given year that it would be flooded. The Eastlands successfully challenged the agency’s maps, which would have designated the area of the camp as high-risk and required the owners to carry extra insurance.

The camp’s instructions to counselors in the event of a flood were minimal, and reassured them that “all cabins are constructed on high, safe locations.” Instead of being trained in evacuation procedures, the lawsuit says, “counselors flipped through their manuals with Edward and Mary Liz Eastland and were told a flood was not going to happen.”

The suit condemns the camp’s actions after the flooding, beginning with the initial notices to the parents in the late morning of July 4 that their daughters were “unaccounted for,” sent at a time when some girls’ bodies had already been found.

In the early hours of July 4, Richard and Edward Eastland met in the camp’s main office about 30 minutes after the National Weather Service’s 1:14 a.m. warning of life-threatening flooding, and set the grounds crew to work securing equipment. At about 2:20 a.m., several counselors ran to the two men to ask for help, reporting that water was pouring into Bug House, the cabin closest to the river. The men went to the cabin and told the girls there to lay towels down and to stay put in the cabin.

Around 2:30 a.m., the lawsuit says, campers and counselors from some cabins began evacuating to a large two-story recreation hall a short distance away, and Richard and Edward Eastland took some girls there in their vehicles. But over the course of an hour, they were able to evacuate only five of 11 cabins in the flood zone, according to the suit. Some counselors decided on their own to evacuate their campers, with the leaders of several cabins pulling girls through windows to escape and run up a nearby hill. They could hear screams for help from other cabins, the lawsuit says.

Tweety Eastland and Edward’s wife, Mary Liz Eastland, who are also leaders of the camp and are named as defendants in the lawsuit, were “nowhere to be found” throughout the flooding, the suit says. None of the defendants assisted or gave instructions to the many girls and counselors who made their way to the second floor of the recreation hall until later in the morning, it says.

It was around 3:51 a.m., Mr. Watts said, when Dick Eastland was swept away in his S.U.V., which an unnamed counselor cited in the suit said was full of campers from Bubble Inn, another flooded cabin. No one in the vehicle survived.

The camp’s supporters have characterized Mr. Eastland as a hero who died trying to save children during what the camp has called a “1,000-year weather event.” The lawsuit calls him “grossly negligent” for loading children into a vehicle in waist-deep, and then neck-deep, water and then attempting to drive. Driving through floodwaters violated the advice of experts including the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, a state agency on whose board Mr. Eastland was serving at the time of his death.

Around the same time that Dick Eastland went to Bubble Inn, Edward Eastland went to Twins, a pair of adjoining cabin buildings where girls had been told to stay put, even though they could see that other cabins nearby were being evacuated to the recreation hall, according to the lawsuit.

The girls in Twins climbed to top bunks to try to stay above the water. Some swam out of the cabin to try to reach safety; others were swept out by the water. Edward Eastland was swept through a door to a tree along with several girls, where they held on until the morning. The girls clinging to the tree “watched in horror as their friends floated by, begging for help,” the suit says. Eleven girls from Twins were killed.