What Monday’s Camp Mystic hearing was — and wasn’t

AUSTIN — If you were hoping Monday’s hearing before the Texas General Investigating Committee would reckon with the full scope of the July 4, 2025 flood — all 119 lives lost across Kerr County — that hearing has not happened yet. It may never happen in this form.

What Monday was, instead, was something rarer and in its own way more powerful: a methodical, evidence-based presentation of exactly how a summer camp that had survived floods since 1926 failed the 386 girls entrusted to it on the night the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes.

Investigators Casey Garrett and Judge Michael Massengale — both veterans of the Texas House’s investigation into the Uvalde school shooting — were given a specific mandate: examine what happened at Camp Mystic. They honored that mandate with 140 to 150 witness interviews, multiple site visits, and months of forensic reconstruction. The result was a two-hour presentation that will be difficult to unsee.

It was also, at times, almost unbearable to watch. Garrett — a Houston attorney and 33-year criminal prosecutor — paused repeatedly throughout the day, visibly fighting to maintain the composure her mandate required. She came closest to losing it when she described 10-year-old Greta Torano, swept away after breaking from her group to retrieve a bedsheet. And again, when she displayed the photograph of the Bubble Inn cabin — the faces of 15 girls and their counselors — and told the committee that every single person in that photograph died in the river that night.

The committee reconvenes Tuesday in Austin, where it is expected to hear from officials with the Texas Department of State Health Services, other invited guests, and potentially members of the Eastland family.

What the hearing established

Garrett focused on the failings of three institutions on July 4, and Monday’s hearing named all three.

Camp Mystic failed systematically. There were no evacuation drills. No cabin-level radios. No mass notification system. A one-page emergency plan that told girls on the lowest-lying ground to stay in their cabins — cabins that, in at least three cases, had flat ceilings that left no air space when the water reached the roof. A staffing model that routinely left a single 17 or 18-year-old solely responsible for eight-year-old girls in the middle of the night.

The counselors in those youngest cabins — Bubble In and Twins 1 and 2 — were all first-year counselors. They had no emergency training of any kind. They had no radios, no life jackets, no ladders. The only instruction in their binders regarding a flood was a single paragraph telling them to stay in their cabins unless the office told them otherwise. No one from the office came in time.

When Senator Menendez asked Garrett directly whether a proper written evacuation plan would have saved the children in those cabins, her answer was one word: “Yes.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services failed quietly. An inspector visited Camp Mystic on July 2 — two days before the flood — and marked the camp compliant. She was a sanitation specialist. She verified that a piece of paper had been posted on a wall. She did not evaluate whether anyone had been trained on it, whether it was viable, or whether it addressed all four areas required by the Texas Administrative Code. It did not. Epidemics and fatalities were missing entirely. An evacuation plan did not exist. The camp’s inspection record said yes to questions about training documentation that, investigators found, reflected no training at all. Those discrepancies will likely face direct scrutiny when DSHS officials appear before the committee on Tuesday.

Kerr County’s post-event response failed visibly. Garrett used the word “mayhem” — not to describe the storm, but what came after it. No unified incident command. No centralized tip line for desperate families. No coordinated death notification process. Parents arriving at Grimes Funeral Home were asked if they could identify other people’s children. Bodies were transferred to medical examiners’ offices without notifying families. One justice of the peace said autopsies were mandatory. Another said they weren’t. Nobody was in charge of resolving the contradiction.

The Cajun Navy — carrying thermal drones, helicopters, and hundreds of off-duty first responders with experience from Katrina and Harvey — was told to stand down. A private citizen, not a search and rescue professional, was the one standing next to a child’s body when he called Cajun Navy leader Hunter Burns, prompting the organization to ignore local authorities and deploy anyway. The first organized, professional interaction many families experienced, Garrett told the committee, came Sunday morning when the Texas Rangers arrived to assist with DNA collection.

What the hearing did to Dick Eastland’s legacy

This is the part that will linger.

Garrett was careful — almost conspicuously careful — to frame Dick Eastland as a man who was loved, who comforted anxious parents at drop-off, who taught generations of girls to fish. “We do know Dick Eastland loved every little girl who came to Camp Mystic,” she said.

And then, piece by piece, the presentation built a different record.

Eastland was monitoring weather apps obsessively from 1:14 a.m. onward. He knew four inches of rain had fallen by 2:33 a.m. He drove counselors back to their flooding cabins and told them to put down towels and stay put. During the chaotic final evacuation attempt, Edward Eastland explicitly told the counselors in Bubble Inn and Twins 1 and 2 — the youngest girls, in the cabins with flat ceilings — to stay put while he went for vehicles. He could not get back in time.

The emergency plan for what came after said simply: “Dick will handle all notifications.” When Dick Eastland died in the river, that plan died with him.

His resistance to outside oversight was not incidental to any of this. When the question of joining the American Camp Association arose, his son Britt recalled his father’s position plainly: “I think my dad is just old school. If you have too much regulation, no one is going to want to do this anymore.” Garrett noted that on questions like that one, Eastland typically won the argument. Craig Althouse, a longtime camp employee, called him “Mr. Veto.” The nickname was affectionate. It was also accurate.

There is one more detail the committee heard Monday that has received little attention: at the time of the flood, Dick Eastland was a sitting board member of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority — the regional body whose core mission is flood awareness and river monitoring in Kerr County. He served on that board from 2022 until his death. The man who ran a camp without a written flood evacuation plan was also one of the county’s designated stewards of flood preparedness.

Edward Eastland’s potential appearance before the committee on Tuesday adds another dimension to watch. He was present for the final evacuation attempts. He was submerged at 4:09 a.m. He survived. His account of those final minutes — what he saw, what he decided, and what he was told — has largely been delivered through civil litigation. A legislative hearing is a different forum.

None of this is the portrait of a villain. Garrett never suggested it was. But it is the portrait of a man whose authority was so absolute and so centralized that when he was gone, nothing worked — because nothing had been built to work without him.

That dynamic — one person holding everything, no systems built to survive his absence — is the thread that connects every failure Monday’s hearing documented. It is why 28 people died at Camp Mystic. And it is why, nine months later, a legislative committee is asking the state of Texas to ensure it never happens again.

Monday’s hearing may have felt uniquely aimed at Camp Mystic. But do not expect Tuesday’s to go lightly on the others named in today’s presentation. DSHS signed a compliance report two days before the flood. Kerr County’s emergency response infrastructure failed in plain sight. Those institutions will have their own day in that hearing room — and Monday’s testimony gave the committee everything it needs to ask the hardest questions.