On a recent morning, Britt Eastland was inspecting a trail at his family’s summer camp, anticipating another season of fishing, camping and canoeing just six weeks away. The pale limestone cliffs loomed, an essential feature of the Texas Hill Country. Down below sat rows of tidy cabins with names like Happy Nest.
Days later, Eastland was in a courtroom. Staring back at him from the gallery were parents of 27 girls who died at Camp Mystic last summer in a July 4 flood that also claimed Eastland’s father, Dick. Many wore purple buttons emblazoned with the faces of their lost daughters.
The lawsuits they have filed, accusing the Eastlands of gross negligence, are but one of the obstacles as the family pushes ahead with plans to reopen on May 30.
The state legislature is conducting an investigation. The Texas Rangers recently opened a criminal probe into complaints of negligence by camp leaders on the night of the flood. And Texas’ lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said he was “doubling down” on his campaign to prevent the health department from renewing Mystic’s license this summer.
“How can you reopen a camp when you were entrusted with our children and you clearly failed and you’re not even trying to figure out the failures before you take on more children? I don’t understand,” said Jennie Getten, a Houston mother who sent two daughters to Mystic last summer: Gwynne, and her little sister, Ellen, 9. Gwynne survived; Ellen’s remains were found eight days after the flood and nearly 10 miles down the river.
“We weren’t even allowed to see her body,” Jennie said. “It was that bad.”
As the court proceedings were playing out this past week, an emergency crew was still digging in the bed of the Guadalupe River trying to find another camper, eight-year-old Cile Steward, the only Mystic girl who has yet to be recovered.
Mystic is many things: a cherished Hill Country retreat that gives girls a Christian foundation meant to last them a lifetime; an elite Texas institution that places young women on a path to chosen sororities and social prominence; and a family business whose principals had attained mythic status.
That camp is now a crime scene, its main entrance fenced off. The Eastlands are planning, instead, to operate its sister camp: Mystic Cypress Lake. They built it in 2020 to accommodate some of the many girls stranded on Mystic’s waiting list.
In practical terms, they note, the neighboring Cypress Lake sits on higher ground than the original Guadalupe River campus. Its cabins did not flood last July, and its waterfront uses a separate body of water, Cypress Creek.
“It wasn’t an easy decision,” said Britt Eastland, who directs Cypress Lake with his wife, Catie. “We’ve had a lot of family discussions. We didn’t agree most of the time — how to do it. If to do it.”
They were ultimately swayed, he said, by appeals from more than a thousand of the camp’s alumnae loyalists and families eager for their daughters to return this summer. Many, according to Britt, believed it would be healing. “The last thing we want to do is create any more pain for our parents who are grieving heavily,” he said. “I just knew we had to try.”
Some 850 girls have signed up. About half went to Mystic’s Guadalupe River campus last summer, paying about $7,600 for a month. The remainder are Cypress Lake returnees, and about 50 are new campers. Terms have been shortened to 10 days, the Eastlands said, to give as many girls as possible a bit of Mystic this summer. Meanwhile, another 400 families have kept their Mystic deposits, giving them the option to return next year.
“I still would hand her over, happily, to the Eastlands,” Liberty Lindley said of her daughter, Evie, 10, who — along with her Wiggle Inn cabin mates — floated atop mattresses for hours in the darkness last July before the waters receded. “I just believe in them, and the camp and ministry.”
The Lindleys know what it is to lose a child. Evie’s twin sister, Vivi, died of leukemia last February. Evie—and her long sandy hair and mischievous smile—will spend late July at Cypress Lake. “When I got back I said: I can’t wait to go back next year,” Evie said. “I love it there.”
To many of the families of the dead, returning to Mystic is crass bordering on disrespectful. They have joined together in a group called the Heaven’s 27 to lobby for improved camp safety. On Sept. 5, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill they’d inspired. Their fight has since evolved to target the Eastlands and Mystic.
Wherever moms of girls get together — from school pickups to churches and Facebook groups — the debate rages. Who is returning and who is not? Who is to blame — the Eastlands or the river? Should the camp reopen? And what will happen on May 30?
On a recent spring day, the road that runs alongside the Guadalupe River leading up to Mystic was carpeted with purple wildflowers. The shimmering green river was so calm in stretches it appeared to be sleeping. In the small towns of Kerr County, Mystic is but one piece of a disaster that claimed 119 friends and neighbors from the banks of a river that had no sirens to warn them.
One reason for the Mystic community’s strife, it seems, is because people still don’t agree or understand what happened that night — or in the days that followed.
This past week’s hearing in an Austin courtroom was about preserving evidence for a wrongful-death suit filed against the Eastlands by Cile Steward’s parents, Will and Cici. Yet it offered one of the most detailed — and raw — accounts of the flood, much of it provided by Edward Eastland, who directed the main camp with his wife, Mary Liz.
It became clear that what at first appeared to him and his father as another of the floods that afflicted Mystic every few years grew inexorably through the night until it became monstrous. The central question is whether the Eastlands should have been prepared or if this was a natural disaster beyond all reckoning.
One by one, Bradley Beckworth, the Stewards’ attorney, confronted Edward with the warnings about possible flooding beginning on July 2. The most urgent was a 1:14 a.m. flash flood notification from the National Weather Service on July 4 that warned residents of Hunt, Texas, where Mystic is located, that life-threatening flooding was occurring or would soon begin.
Edward, according to his testimony, had gone to bed around 11 p.m. and slept through the text alert. He was awakened around 1:45 a.m., he said, by a call from Dick, who was monitoring the weather from the main office. “He said we’ve had about 4 inches of rain and we should probably move the canoes and waterfront equipment,” Edward recalled, describing this as standard procedure.
Over the next 30 minutes, the storm would worsen and the three waterways that surround Mystic would all flood. The camp was effectively cut off. Around 2:30 a.m., two counselors from Bug House, the cabin nearest the river, ran to the office to tell Edward and Dick that water was leaking in.
The Eastlands went to inspect and discovered, oddly, that the water was not coming from the swelling river. Rather, it was cascading down the hill behind Bug House. They applied towels and told the girls to stay put. They believed the storm would eventually pass — as summer storms often did. Lightning was a bigger threat to their campers than water.
“There was no indication it was going to come up as high as it did,” Edward told the court.
Around 2:45 a.m. there was more disturbing news. Frances Blackwell, the camp’s gatekeeper, called to say water was flowing into her cottage beside the front entrance and she could not open the door. “I told her she needed to get up the hill as quickly as possible,” Edward recalled. Her radio went silent. The Eastlands did not yet know it, but the gatehouse had been razed by the flood.
Finally, around 3 a.m., Dick ordered Edward and Glenn Juenke, the night watchman, to begin evacuating Bug House and two other cabins by the river. Rather than issuing an order over the camp’s loudspeaker, the men drove the short distance in their trucks and ferried loads of girls toward the higher ground of the Rec Hall.
“This was just unbelievably unforeseeable,” Edward testified.
“It was foreseeable for three days!” Beckworth, the plaintiffs’ attorney, countered.
“Not like this,” Edward replied.
Soon the men were overmatched. After two trips in his pickup truck, Juenke, a retired Houston policeman, waded through rushing waters to the Wiggle Inn cabin and became stranded.
“I refuse to call it a flood anymore,” Juenke said in an interview. “I call it an inland tsunami.”
Quick thinking led him to open the door and punch out Wiggle Inn’s window screens so water would flow through. He managed to save the girls, including Evie Lindley, by creating a flotilla of mattresses for them to shelter on while the water rose nearly to the ceiling. By luck, the mattresses were new, and still wrapped in plastic. At some point he saw Dick’s Chevy Tahoe float away.
Edward was, by then, bracing himself against the water in the doorway of the Twins II cabin, where Cile Steward and 22 other girls were stranded. The girls had clambered up to the top bunks until the rising water began pressing them against the ceiling. A counselor screamed that girls were being swept out the door.
“I grabbed two girls and there was a third one that I didn’t grab,” Edward recalled, sobbing. Another girl — he did not know who — threw her arms around his neck. Then he was swept away and submerged.
“What happened to Cile?” the lawyer asked.
“I don’t know.”
Edward would latch onto a tree a few hundred yards down river and hold tight until he was rescued at daybreak, a period that he described as a blur. A Twins counselor said in a written statement she heard Edward say “he could not hold on anymore and he was begging God to stop the water.”
Throughout Edward’s testimony, he and Beckworth sparred over whether Mystic had a written evacuation plan — or if it merely existed in Dick’s head. If there was a plan, the attorney demanded, would 27 children have died that night?
Edward, visibly shaken, paused before mentioning “hindsight.” Then he blurted: “I wish we had never had camp that summer.”
The hearing was excruciating for Carrie Hanna, who sat in the courtroom with her husband, Doug. The Hannas’ daughter, Hadley, 8 — “the glue of the family,” said Carrie— was one of the Twins II campers who died in the flood. “You think you know a lot and then there’s always something new and horrific,” said Carrie, who spent 14 years as a camper and counselor at Mystic until 2005.
Last July 4, the Hannas, the Gettens, and so many other parents, awoke to exploding text messages and then made a panicked drive to Kerrville, the biggest city near Mystic and roughly four hours from Dallas and Houston. Once there, they endured a cruel sorting in the gymnasium of the Ingram Elementary School, which had been repurposed as a reunification center. There were those whose daughters were presumed safe, and those who were told they were “unaccounted for.”
Eventually, the latter were ushered to the Trinity First Baptist Church, where the Gettens remained until late that night, when, Jennie Getten recalled: “They told us the justice of the peace was too tired to identify any more bodies.”
Many Mystic parents complained about the camp’s poor communication. What Doug Getten, a partner at the Baker Botts law firm in Houston, cannot forgive is the sense that the Eastlands were withholding information when Edward and Mary Liz turned up at the school and then the church. By then they knew Dick had been found dead in his Tahoe with three girls.
“I want to be polite,” he said in a measured tone. “It bothers me a lot today thinking back to that.”
“If they had said ‘We’re so sorry, we messed up’ — if there had been some accountability — we wouldn’t be where we are today,” Carrie Hanna said. “I did not want to sue them. This is not how I want to live.”
On phone calls, and in person, the families of the dead girls began to meet to share their grief and swap notes. The Heaven’s 27 was born.
Then, in early September, they were shocked to discover the Eastlands had sent an email to the rest of the Mystic community: Camp was back on.
The first lawsuits against the Eastlands landed in November. The one lodged by Cile Steward’s parents came in February, and makes for harrowing reading. It describes a camp repeatedly beset by floods — including a major one in 1932 — and a family who wouldn’t acknowledge the danger. Their decision to order girls to shelter in place on July 4 was “a death sentence,” the complaint states, when safety for Cile and others was just steps away. “Behind the veneer of Christian tradition and rustic charm, the Eastlands operated Camp Mystic as something very different from its outward image,” it states.
Britt Eastland has his own, notably different, understanding of those days in which the Eastlands were not callous but heroic. “Edward, Glenn and my dad did everything they could and went to the danger,” he said.
Britt is lanky and friendly and given to saying things in conversation like “God works in mysterious ways” without a trace of irony. Each summer he is a father to hundreds of girls.
He’d eschewed the family business to practice law in San Antonio but came back after his brother James, Dick’s heir apparent, died unexpectedly in 2015 at age 34.
Britt and his wife were stationed at Cypress Lake camp that night and didn’t realize the magnitude of flooding by the Guadalupe cabins until it was too late and the water had made it impossible to get there.
At the First Baptist Church, he said, the Eastlands were trying to be respectful as people grieved. “We were just like everyone else: still hopeful that some people were going to be found alive,” he explained. In the following days, they attended all the Mystic funerals — except ones, like Ellen Getten’s, where they were not welcome, he said.
Dick is gone and Edward is suffering from PTSD. By September, they claim, lawyers representing some of the families informed them they should cease direct contact, pending legal action. Still, the Eastlands say they consulted a few Heaven’s 27 families before deciding whether and when to reopen.
Several of the Eastlands including Britt participated in a short video about the camp, “Through The Storm,” that posted online in March. “With God’s help, Camp Mystic is emerging from this storm and moving forward,” a narrator intones. “Those who truly know how it all transpired know that this 1,000-year flood could not have been anticipated.” It credited the Eastlands with saving more than 160 girls “but they couldn’t save them all.”
To prepare for this summer, the Eastlands have installed a series of water meters that measure river levels and currents in real time and will sound alarms automatically. They will have added security, backup Wi-Fi and generators. AIG is their insurer.
The Eastlands have also hired a therapist who will be at the camp full-time. There is already dread about how girls who endured the horror of the flood will respond to their first summer storm.
In Dallas, Carrie Hanna was hurt to discover that friends she thought were boycotting the camp are, in fact, sending their daughters this summer. Meanwhile, she’s tormented by the knowledge that Hadley was only 20 or so paces from the safety of the Mystic commissary, if only she’d left her cabin. There is also the guilt of having signed her up for a month of sleep-away camp when her daughter would have rather stayed with her mother. “I’ll always regret that,” Carrie said.
Meanwhile, the battle lines have hardened. “We have not felt any sort of love from the Mystic community. At all,” Jennie Getten said recently — no meal trains, no flowers, no support for their mental health. “A lot of them think we’re trying to destroy Mystic.”
Liberty Lindley saw it otherwise: “They’ve drawn the line and made it very clear: ‘if you don’t side 100% with us, then go to hell.’”
Late Wednesday afternoon, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ordered the Eastlands to preserve evidence at Mystic, writing that the facts tended to show that they had breached their duty of care to Cile Steward by operating “in a high-risk zone without adequate flood protections” or a “written evacuation plan.” The case will go to trial next year.
In the meantime, no one seems to know what will happen when the buses from Austin, Houston and Dallas round the bend on Highway 39 next month—if they are allowed to. Mystic, once secluded from the road, is now entirely visible since the flood razed the stand of trees and vegetation that once screened off the outside world. It rests in a ghostly state, empty cabins with a familiar sign affixed to the dining hall, Be The Light. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/texas-camp-mystic-flood-reopening-7fa2376a?mod=hp_lead_pos7
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