As Ruskan heads to the ESPYs, the story of his Camp Mystic rescue has outrun the record

In the immediate aftermath of the deadly July 4, 2025 flood, good news was hard to come by, and the need for a heroic story took center stage when then Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived in Kerrville.

Noem assured the shattered community that help was already on scene, and more was on the way. She praised the “coasties” who came with an “airframe” to help with the response. The decoded jargon was that the U.S. Coast Guard flew in by helicopter to help. One day later, Noem identified a heroic story of one helicopter crew from Corpus Christi, singling out the work of Petty Officer Scott Ruskan.

Noem wrote on X that Ruskan “directly saved an astonishing 165 victims.” President Donald Trump, the same week, credited “Scott Ruskan” alone — dropping the rest of his four-person aircrew. During a July 11 appearance in Kerrville, Trump asked if Ruskan was in attendance at a press event.

The story of Scott Ruskan made its way around the world: a heroic rescue swimmer who single-handedly saved the lives of 165 girls at Camp Mystic, and it’s circulating again this month after ESPN announced he would receive an ESPY award for courage.

The narrative spread quickly through Texas’s congressional delegation. On July 16, Rep. Dan Crenshaw included Ruskan in a constituent newsletter, writing that he “plunged into the floodwaters” and “personally rescued 165 people stranded by the high water.” Crenshaw linked to a New York Times story but added physical-rescue details the Times account did not support. A week later, Sen. John Cornyn credited Ruskan with saving “165 young campers and staffers during his first-ever rescue mission.”

Neither account matched the official record. The Distinguished Flying Cross citation the Coast Guard issued in Ruskan’s name described a ground-based operation: he “volunteered to remain on the ground” and “coordinated the evacuation of 169 people.” The number of people evacuated had also grown in transit — from Noem’s 165 to the Coast Guard’s official 169.

In February, Ruskan’s efforts were singled out by Trump during the State of the Union, where the Coast Guard petty officer was awarded the Legion of Merit, along with a host of honors, which include a Distinguished Flying Cross.

“As the waters threatened to sweep her away,” the president said, an 11-year-old camper named Milly Cate McClymond closed her eyes and prayed — and “those prayers were answered when Coast Guard rescue swimmer Scott Ruskan descended from a helicopter above.” He “lifted not just Milly Cate, but 164 others to safety,” the president said.

Ahead of the ESPY’s media attention has helped spread the story of the rescues.

“26-year-old Ruskan executed multiple high-risk rescues on his first-ever mission, saving 165 children from raging waters at Campy Mystic,” wrote Houston’s ABC affiliate on June 23. “For three hours, he was the only trained responder at the camp, establishing triage areas, organizing safe zones, carrying barefoot children through the darkness and comforting them as rescue operations continued,” wrote a Boise, Idaho TV station.

The problem is that none of those assertions were true.

Still, Ruskan is scheduled to accept the Pat Tillman Award for Service at the ESPY Awards, ESPN’s honor for a person connected to sports who has served others in the spirit of the late NFL player and Army Ranger. Tillman’s death, of course, was initially described as a heroic one that obscured the harsh reality — he died in a friendly-fire incident.

To his credit, Ruskan’s own account has not wavered since the first week. His four-person aircrew launched from Air Station Corpus Christi around 7 a.m. and fought through storms that turned a one-hour flight into roughly seven hours, reaching the Hunt area after several failed attempts. Once there, the crew made a deliberate choice to leave him on the ground at Camp Mystic so the helicopter could carry more people, and he spent about three hours as the lone on-site Coast Guard responder, helping organize children for evacuation, comforting them, and directing groups to the helicopters — including his own crew’s aircraft — that ferried them out eight to ten at a time.

He has repeatedly resisted the spotlight. The counselors and campers were the “real heroes,” he has said; the older counselors saved lives in the first minutes by getting girls to higher ground before any professional arrived. In an interview this month, he described himself as “a small piece of the puzzle” among thousands of responders and added that he “just happened to get picked up by the media.” Asked about a swift-water rescue, he noted he had trained for one but did not have the gear or team to attempt it that day.

That is the rescue the record describes: a dangerous, demanding daylight triage-and-evacuation effort, coordinated on the ground, after the river had already crested and begun to fall — and conducted alongside dozens of other agencies whose names never reached the State of the Union.

What the attention on Ruskan’s story obscures is an actual heroic effort by multiple helicopter crews who had to navigate treacherous conditions to save people in the immediate aftermath of the flood, which killed 119 people in Kerr County.

By the time Ruskan’s crew arrived at approximately 2:30 p.m., the waters had begun to recede at Camp Mystic and across Kerr County, but helicopters were a constant presence across the region. Hours earlier, KPD’s dispatchers were managing a mass casualty event from 3:33 a.m., police officers wading through floodwaters before dawn to reach wheelchair-bound residents, Ingram Volunteer Fire on scene in Hunt recovering victims in the dark, the Kerr County Sheriff’s deputies coordinating in the field, Center Point Fire Department briefing state task force squads and assigning them search areas. KFD Lieutenants commanding state resources at Camp Mystic at 8 p.m.

These agencies were not supporting characters in someone else’s story. They were running the operation, and in many cases, they were running it before the sun came up, before any state or federal aerial asset could physically reach the affected areas.

The narrative in which a federal swimmer descends from the sky as the waters rise also implies something false about timing: that help arrived in time. The record shows the opposite. During the hours when people were actually being swept away — roughly 4 to 6 a.m. — there were no rescue helicopters over Camp Mystic, and the officials on the radio were unable to get one there. The first arrived around 10 a.m., to a river that was still dangerous but not at peak flooding.

This is not a story about a responder who lied, and it should not be read as one. Ruskan did not claim to have descended from a helicopter to rescue a drowning child. He did not claim to have personally lifted 165 people to safety. In interview after interview, he has pushed back gently on the framing applied to him, described himself as a small piece of the puzzle, and returned credit to the counselors and to the larger response community. He has said the kids were the heroes. The record agrees with him.

On July 15, a national audience will applaud a version of his day that he himself has spent a year trying to correct. The most accurate account of what happened at Camp Mystic on July 4 — and across Kerr County in the hours before that — remains the one he keeps giving, and the one the call logs, the staging reports, and other reports have documented from the start.