Camp Mystic faces mounting pressure to close as nine hours of testimony culminate in mother’s extraordinary plea

AUSTIN — By the time CiCi Steward turned her back on the Texas Legislature Tuesday afternoon and faced the Eastland family directly, Camp Mystic’s path to reopening had already been narrowed to nearly nothing by nine hours of testimony that was by turns methodical, searing and devastating.

The joint General Investigating Committee on the July 2025 Flooding Events convened its second day of hearings with the Eastland family in the witness chairs and ended it with the mother of the only Camp Mystic camper whose remains have not been recovered delivering what may be the most powerful statement in the investigation’s history. In between, legislators admonished the camp’s operators on multiple fronts, Texas’ top emergency manager detailed the collapse of local incident command, and two parents of survivors described children who waited obediently to drown because no one told them to walk to safety.

The cumulative weight of the day pointed in one direction. Camp Mystic’s license application, already carrying 22 safety deficiencies, faces a committee that has heard everything it needs to hear.

The Eastlands

The family — Edward, Britt, Richard and Mary Liz Eastland — spent four hours in the witness chairs absorbing the sharpest legislative criticism of the two-day hearing.

Sen. Charles Perry told them plainly what the day’s testimony had been building toward. “Y’all will not be an operator next season,” he said. “Because you just missed it and it was tragic.” He accused Britt Eastland of being “extremely disingenuous” for arguing the doomed cabins were technically outside the FEMA floodplain — pointing out that Dick Eastland had deliberately lobbied to carve Camp Mystic out of the floodway map in 2013. The patriarch, Perry said, had done a “tremendous disservice by example and by history and by instilling a fear” that “manifested itself into 27 lives lost.”

Sen. Lois Kolkhorst confronted Mary Liz Eastland — the camp’s registered nurse and listed medical director — about the fact that she has still not reported the 27 deaths to the Texas Department of State Health Services, 10 months after the flood. State law requires notification within 24 hours. Mary Liz acknowledged she had not filed the report. Kolkhorst’s response was not measured. “Report the 27 deaths,” she said. “Don’t be above the law. Please, please. I’m begging you.”

Rep. Paul Dyson challenged the family’s written flood directive instructing counselors to stay in their cabins. When the Eastlands defended it as a precaution against children wandering into floodwater, Dyson was unsparing. Telling people to stay put, he said, is “the antithesis of an evacuation plan.” Rep. Erin Gámez pressed a separate question that went unanswered: “What were the adults on Uptight doing other than watching?”

Among the most consequential admissions of the morning came when Edward Eastland acknowledged that in the chaos of vehicle evacuations, it simply never occurred to him to use the camp’s PA system — established Monday as functional throughout the critical window — to order a camp-wide evacuation. He also acknowledged that after telling Jumble House counselors to walk to safety at approximately 3:20 a.m. — an order that saved them — he told the counselors in Twins 1 and 2 and Bubble Inn to stay put. He intended to return. He could not. The family also revised upward a significant figure from Monday’s testimony, placing the number of able-bodied adults gathered safely at the Uptight Garage area during the flood at approximately 45. None were deployed to help rescue the trapped girls.

The family rejected the word complacency, arguing Dick Eastland was blinded by inaccurate rainfall data and faulty river gauges. They disputed the characterization that cabin staffing had eroded dangerously. They called their counselors heroes. The committee was unmoved.

The state’s emergency chief

Chief Nim Kidd, director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, confirmed the timeline that has emerged from prior testimony and a federal inspector general’s report: the National Weather Service began attempting to reach Kerr County officials at 3:38 a.m. on July 4. What neither Kidd nor the committee addressed is that by 3:38 a.m., people were already dying — the first fatalities of the night occurred at approximately 3:30 a.m. at River Inn, west of Camp Mystic. Nor did the hearing acknowledge that 911 dispatch was already fielding 87 calls from the Hunt area in that single hour, causing incoming NWS calls to be immediately disconnected. The county’s emergency management coordinator was not reached until 6:19 a.m.

When Kidd arrived on the scene, he found the Kerr County Incident Command Center and the City of Kerrville overwhelmed and operating in complete isolation. Under state law, TDEM cannot command or control local resources — only coordinate and support. He described gently encouraging the two entities to share a facility and establish unified command. They had not done so on their own.

Kidd identified a loophole that drew sharp attention from the committee: while police officers and paid firefighters must graduate from certified academies, a person needs only three hours of training and the signature of a mayor or county judge to become a local emergency management coordinator in Texas. “That needs to change,” he said. He also noted that volunteer firefighters — critical components of local incident command across vast portions of the state — face zero state training mandates.

He pushed back against the expectation of precise meteorological prediction. “Weather is not science,” he said. “It’s art.” By the time a flash flood emergency is issued, he said, it is almost always too late for prevention. Preparedness must precede the storm. Kidd proposed five legislative reforms: a mutual aid system for justices of the peace and medical examiners, a spontaneous volunteer registry, mandatory credentialing for emergency management coordinators, baseline training for volunteer firefighters and continued investment in interoperable communications.

The parents

Dr. Julie Sprunt Marshall, a practicing surgeon and mother of McKenzie, a 9-year-old survivor from Twins 2, delivered a methodical indictment of Mary Liz Eastland’s conduct as the camp’s medical officer. Mary Liz admitted under oath, Marshall told the committee, that she did not know the camp was under a flash flood watch, did not know the difference between a watch and a warning, and had not signed up for emergency alerts. When the gatehouse flooded, Marshall said, Mary Liz did nothing — did not warn the nurses on site, did not check the cabins, did not call 911. She evacuated to higher ground. The campers were left without medical supervision.

Marshall described McKenzie watching flashlights bob in the darkness as other campers reached safety while the girls in Twins 2 waited because they had been told to stay in place. When the water rose to within two feet of the ceiling, bunk beds tipped over and spilled the children into the floodwaters. McKenzie was swept out a window into churning darkness, pushed underwater repeatedly. “This is what it is like to die,” she told her mother she had thought.

Marshall also described a handwritten letter the camp mailed directly to the 9-year-old without her parents’ knowledge, telling the traumatized child that “camp is even more beautiful in heaven” and asking her to imagine the “heavenly chorus of Dick and our precious Mystic sisters singing songs together.” She called it the exact opposite of what a grieving child needed. She closed with a direct plea: “Do not let this camp reopen on the schedule and on the terms set by the people who failed our daughters.”

Bolton Walters, father of another survivor, told the committee a safe second-story structure was 20 steps from his daughter’s cabin. No one ever told the girls to go there. Grant Griffin, the contractor whose property adjoins Camp Mystic, described hearing cries of “help me” in the darkness and jumping into debris-filled floodwater with his daughter’s boyfriend to pull two girls from the trees. He testified the river rose approximately 34 feet in roughly two hours.

CiCi Steward

She had prepared a statement. She set it aside.

CiCi Steward, mother of Cile Steward — the only Camp Mystic camper whose remains have not been recovered — told the committee her testimony had changed in light of what the Eastland family said earlier in the day. Then she turned away from the legislative dais and faced the Eastlands directly.

“I haven’t seen y’all yet,” she told them. “So thank you for making eye contact with me for the first time in almost 10 months.”

She told the committee she had been in Hunt on April 20, standing on the banks of the Guadalupe River calling out to her daughter’s spirit and asking her to help bring her home. She then addressed the Eastland family’s defense of the shelter-in-place protocol that trapped the youngest girls in cabins with flat ceilings as the water rose.

“The Eastlands cavalierly insist, ‘Hey, we had a plan. You just didn’t like it,'” she said. “Well, excuse my language, but damn right we didn’t like it. Their so-called plan killed our daughters.”

She described Dick Eastland’s legacy with precision. “He enforced a culture of obedience so powerful that their staff, including the directors of the camp and his children, were afraid to assist helpless children if it meant defying Dick’s orders,” she said. “The title director demands diligence, not deference to dad.”

She disclosed that Camp Mystic is seeking to move the civil litigation to arbitration — a closed-door proceeding — with a hearing scheduled for the week of May 13, just two weeks before the camp’s first scheduled session. She described a Camp Mystic lawyer approaching her attorneys in open court and telling them they would burn in hell for trying to help her find her daughter. When questioned, she said, the lawyer — whom she identified as Thomas Wright — replied “Oh, did I say that?” and smirked. “You can see it all on the video,” she said. “He was proud.”

She turned again to the Eastlands when Britt’s suggestion that families would one day thank him for reopening the camp came up.

“Do not insult me by pretending that reopening is anything more than your family’s attempt at self-preservation,” she said. “Do not degrade me by pretending you care about safeguarding or reducing my pain. Do not ever tell our families that one day we will be happy that you opened camp this summer. You have no right to contemplate or presume our happiness. How dare you. Shame on you. You stole our happiness on July 4th.”

Then she spoke about her daughter.

“A hummingbird’s heart beats a thousand times a minute,” she said. “Its wings flapping so fast that they hum and vibrate. Cile moved through the world like a hummingbird. Quick and bright and nimble. Always in motion and hard to pin down, even when she was standing right in front of you.”

She described a daughter wired the same way she was — the same temperament, the same humor, the same lovable defiance. A daughter she recognized the way you recognize your own reflection.

“I will spend the rest of my life walking past mirrors and seeing the woman she should have been,” she said. “What was taken from us at Camp Mystic wasn’t only her body. It was all of that motion. All the places she was still going to go. The whole long life she was owed.”

She closed with a charge to the committee that required no elaboration.

“Neither a storm nor a river took her from us,” she said. “The Eastland family’s complacency, hubris, and choices took her from her family, from her life, and from her future. Camp Mystic’s license should not be renewed. If a child dies at a Texas camp this summer, it will not be because we lack the information to prevent it. It will be because we did not act on it.”

The chamber was quiet when she finished. Chairman Morgan Meyer told her the state of Texas would not rest until Cile is found. No other members had questions. There were no words adequate to the moment.