Texas Rangers are pursuing a criminal investigation into Camp Mystic that could bring manslaughter, negligent homicide, and child abandonment charges, more than a year after a flood on the Guadalupe River killed 27 girls and counselors.
A Texas Ranger's affidavit alleges the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp in Hunt, Texas, had no adequate emergency plan, never ran evacuation drills, and left children in low-lying cabins even as staff monitored flood warnings in the hours before the Guadalupe River surged before dawn on July 4, 2025. Twenty-five campers and two teenage counselors died. Camp owner Richard "Dick" Eastland, 70, also lost his life trying to save the girls, the Daily Mail reported.
The affidavit, filed by Texas Rangers investigator Brant Johnston, lays out a damning sequence: camp leadership knew about the rising water, failed to move children to higher ground, and staffed some cabins with too few adult counselors to manage an emergency. Johnston concluded that Camp Mystic "was aware of and consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death to the campers in their care."
No charges have been filed yet. But investigators have already executed search warrants seeking electronic communications from camp owners, looking for evidence that could support charges of manslaughter, negligent homicide, child abandonment, or other crimes, the New York Post reported. Several members of the Eastland family and other top camp officials have refused interviews with investigators.
The picture emerging from the investigation and from civil lawsuits is one of an institution that traded safety basics for tradition. Camp Mystic enforced a no-screen policy that required staff to turn off their phones while working. Counselor Caroline Cutrona told CNN that while owners and a few senior leaders carried walkie-talkies, most counselors had nothing, no phones, no radios, no way to receive the weather emergency alerts that went out that night.
Cutrona also said counselors had not received evacuation training.
That left children functionally on their own when the water came. Johnston's affidavit made the point bluntly:
"Young campers cannot reasonably be expected to independently recognize a rapidly developing, life-threatening hazard or to organize and execute an evacuation absent direction from an adequate number of adult supervisors."
Thirteen girls and two counselors were staying in the Bubble Inn cabin, one of the low-lying structures nearest the river, when the floods hit. A wrongful death lawsuit filed by families of six victims, girls aged eight and nine, alleges that camp leaders met with grounds staff at 1:47 a.m. to secure equipment rather than evacuate children, even though a life-threatening flash flood warning had been issued at 1:14 a.m., Fox News reported. The camp's own emergency instructions told families all cabins sat on "high, safe ground." In reality, Camp Mystic sits in a FEMA-designated Special Flood Hazard Area.
Camp leaders told children to shelter in place as water closed in on the cabins. They were securing equipment while the youngest campers waited in structures that were already taking on water.
Adding to the institutional failure: state inspectors approved Camp Mystic's disaster plan just two days before the flood. The camp was not accredited at the time of the disaster, a detail that raises its own questions about oversight. Texas, before the tragedy, did not enforce the kind of mandatory safety standards that states like New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Michigan, and California already had on the books, standards that make best-practice safety rules legally binding rather than voluntary.
The state's Department of State Health Services received more than 600 complaints about Camp Mystic after the flood, many alleging negligence and urging that the camp's license not be renewed. Parents of nine girls who died sued six DSHS officials in February, alleging the camp lacked required written evacuation and disaster plans, Just The News reported.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick weighed in directly, urging DSHS not to renew or approve a camp license for Camp Mystic, or any other camp the same operators try to run, "until your investigation, and all criminal and legislative investigations are complete and necessary corrective actions are taken." Despite that, the camp had already applied for license renewal and accepted applications for roughly 900 campers for the coming summer.
Camp Mystic did not ultimately reopen. It filed for bankruptcy reorganization.
The grief of the families has been compounded by what they describe as a wall of silence from the camp's owners. Attorneys Christina Yarnell and Brad Beckworth, representing the family of victim Cile Steward, put it in plain terms:
"For more than a year, families of the 27 angels killed at Camp Mystic have fought, begged, and pleaded with the Eastland family for accountability and answers."
The attorneys accused the Eastlands of holding "hostage the information and answers owed to parents who deserve, more than anyone, to know the details surrounding their daughters' final moments."
A Dallas-based father who lost a daughter at Camp Mystic spoke to the Daily Mail on condition of anonymity. His words carried the weight of a parent who trusted an institution and now lives with the result. He said that had he known the truth about the camp's safety posture, he would have "questioned whether Mystic had the people and policies sufficiently in place to keep her alive."
Then he said two words that no parent should ever have to say about a summer camp: "I failed her."
He offered a warning to other families:
"I'd like to tell people what I wish someone told us, that just because a camp has been around forever, just because it's respected by people you consider respectable families doesn't mean it's going to keep your kid safe."
Camp Mystic has denied liability in the civil lawsuits, calling the flood an unforeseeable natural disaster. Jeff Ray, legal counsel for the camp, said the defense intends to prove "that this sudden surge of floodwaters far exceeded any previous flood in the area by several magnitudes, that it was unexpected and that no adequate warning systems existed in the area."
That claim runs directly into the facts laid out in Johnston's affidavit: that camp staff monitored late-night flood warnings, that a life-threatening flash flood warning went out more than an hour before the water reached the cabins, and that leadership chose to secure equipment rather than evacuate sleeping children. If the flood was truly unforeseeable, investigators want to know why staff were up monitoring warnings in the middle of the night.
The criminal probe is ongoing. Breitbart reported that no charges have been filed yet, but the search warrants for electronic communications signal that investigators are building a case around what camp owners knew and when they knew it.
Texas has since enacted regulatory reforms for summer camps, putting the state on par with the six states that already enforced mandatory safety standards. Those reforms came too late for 27 families.
Among the victims identified: Renee Smajstrla, Janie Hunt, Sarah Marsh, Lila Bonner, Eloise Peck, Hadley Hanna, Anne Margaret Bellows, Wynne Naylor, Mary Kathryn Jacobe, Lainey Landry, Mary Stevens, Linnie McCown, Hanna and Rebecca Lawrence, and Blair and Brooke Harber. Not all 27 victims have been publicly named.
Every one of them was someone's daughter, entrusted to an institution that had operated for a hundred years on the banks of a flood-prone river. The institution failed. The question now is whether that failure was a crime, and whether the people who ran Camp Mystic will ever be held to account for it.
