Clinging to trees, screaming for help: Lawsuits paint heartbreaking picture of girls’ last moments at Camp Mystic

By Alaa Elassar and Holly Yan, CNN

(CNN) — Weeks before 8-year-old Eloise “Lulu” Peck was carried off by the violent Texas floods that swallowed Camp Mystic in a surge of darkness and debris, she had suddenly begun to fear the forces that would one day claim her.

She filled a page in her notebook with a drawing of rising water, black skies and the kind of creeping dread that children rarely have words for.

“(The drawings were) a quiet reflection of the worries that lingered in her gentle heart,” her parents wrote in the lawsuit they filed on her behalf. “That she left this world in the very way she feared most is a truth too heavy to bear.”

In the pitch-black, storm-lashed hours before dawn on Independence Day, surging floodwaters ravaged Hunt and Kerr County in central Texas, including the summer camp filled with sleeping children.

Four months’ worth of rain fell in just hours and the nearby Guadalupe River rose to 30 feet, sweeping homes, cars, campers and cabins downstream.

The catastrophic flooding killed 27 girls and counselors at Camp Mystic.

Lulu’s family, along with the families of 17 other campers and two counselors, have filed lawsuits against the all-girls Christian camp and its owners, accusing them of gross negligence.

The court filings accuse the camp of failing to move cabins out of flood-prone areas, responding poorly to the emergency, and putting profits ahead of the safety of the girls in their care.

The four lawsuits, filed last week, are the first attempt by grieving parents to seek accountability for the flood that turned a haven of faith and childhood friendships into a scene of unimaginable loss.

“The conditions surrounding their deaths were marked by absolute horror, physical pain, and emotional distress, all of which were foreseeable and preventable had Defendants acted with even minimal care for their safety,” the Peck family lawsuit said.

The lawsuits provide an account of the living nightmare that unfolded that morning on July 4 and shed light on the last moments of young girls struggling to survive. Here’s what we learned.

Holding on for dear life

The children taken by the current of the furious river clung to the branches of trees, according to one of the lawsuits, their bodies engulfed in foul, mud-laden water swirling with debris. They held on, blind to whatever threats drifted beneath the murky surface.

“Some victims survived for a period of time, while trapped within the cabins, enduring prolonged physical suffering, panic, and terror as the water level rose beyond their reach,” the Peck family lawsuit alleges.

“Others were pulled into the current and swept away into the darkness. These children faced the unimaginable; a slow and terrifying awareness that they were being overcome by the flood, alone in darkness, unable to reach safety,” the lawsuit states.

As the rain poured down and lightning split the sky, counselors in two cabins near a hill made the desperate choice to flee the rapidly rising waters, the lawsuit claims.

They climbed through windows, dragging terrified girls into the deluge, running across mud-slicked ground to the top of a hill. Hours passed as they waited, soaked and shivering in the relentless rain, listening “to screams for help from other cabins that housed their friends and fellow campers,” says the lawsuit filed by the families of five campers and two counselors who perished: Anna Margaret Bellows, Lila Bonner, Chloe Childress, Molly DeWitt, Katherine Ferruzzo, Lainey Landry and Blakely McCrory.

Five other cabins were evacuated to Rec Hall, an older, two-story structure on higher ground than the lower lying cabins, according to that lawsuit.

From their vantage point, they could see the counselors in the cabins that were told not to evacuate “flashing SOS on their flashlights, begging the Camp for help.”

Those cabins are where little girls had been sleeping, mere steps from the swelling river.

In the Twins cabins, girls startled awake by thunder begged Edward Eastland, a camp director and the co-owners’ son, to allow them to evacuate.

“He told them they had to stay because the water would go back down,” the lawsuit said. But it didn’t.

“The girls got on their top bunks, as the water pressed them against the cabin ceiling. Several girls decided to swim out to avoid drowning in the cabin, and others were swept out by rushing waters. Some girls never made it out of the cabin,” stated that same lawsuit.

About 30 minutes later, Eastland and several girls were washed out to a tree nearby, where they held on through the night. Some campers tried to grasp its branches, only to be torn away by the raging current; others bobbed by, unable to reach it.

“Girls in the tree watched in horror as their friends floated by begging for help,” the lawsuit said.

Camp Mystic attorney Mikal Watts told CNN that despite spotty cell coverage and chaotic conditions, Eastland and his father, Richard “Dick” Eastland, were actively helping evacuate campers within 2 hours of receiving the first warning, emphasizing that the camp had moved 166 girls to safety during those critical hours.

Dick Eastland, who co-owned Camp Mystic with his wife, Tweety, died trying to save some of the girls, a family spokesperson has said.

‘Russian Roulette with the lives of the little girls’

The trees the campers clung to had weathered floods before, but nothing like this. It was Texas’ deadliest freshwater flooding in more than a century.

Long before the morning of July 4, Camp Mystic’s owners knew how powerful and dangerous the Guadalupe River was, the lawsuits allege.

The camp’s history of flooding is long and deadly, with major inundations in 1932, 1978 and 1984, and the flooding of a nearby camp in 1987, Peck family lawsuit said.

Yet, Camp Mystic failed to build adequate warning systems, evacuation routes, or modern flood safeguards, the victims’ family lawsuits allege.

Eastland warned for decades about the hidden dangers of the beautiful but volatile Guadalupe River, a peril he saw firsthand while running his family’s youth camp alongside its banks.

He successfully pushed for a new flood warning system after 10 children at a nearby camp were swept to their deaths in 1987, and in recent years served on the board of the local river authority as it supported renewed efforts to improve warnings on the Guadalupe.

“I’m sure there will be other drownings,” Eastland said in a 1990 interview with the Austin American-Statesman. “People don’t heed the warnings.”

Eastland has been praised as a hero for his efforts to save campers and remembered as a beloved figure by generations who spent their summers in the idyllic riverside refuge. His legacy is less clear as a public steward of the sometimes deadly river that ultimately took his life.

About a decade after it was installed, the warning system Eastland had championed in the late ‘80s had already become antiquated and broken. The river authority ultimately shut it down in 1999, saying it was “unreliable with some of the system’s stations not reporting information,” according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times. Yet periodic attempts to adopt a more modern flood-monitoring system, including one with warning sirens that might have alerted campers last week, repeatedly failed to gain traction – stalled by low budgets, some local opposition and a lack of state support.

But parents point out another concern.

Most of the cabins had been located in FEMA’s 100-year “Special Flood Hazard Area” up until 2013. That’s when the camp petitioned FEMA to remove most of the cabins from floodplain maps, says the lawsuit filed by the families of five campers and two counselors. The move did nothing but spare the Eastlands costly insurance premiums and expensive renovations, the filing states.

“Since July 1932, Camp Mystic knew that cabins that housed defenseless little girls sat in the bullseye of potential flood waters from the Guadalupe River and never said a word about it to trusting parents,” the Peck family lawsuit says. “Since that date, Camp Mystic continued to play Russian Roulette with the lives of the little girls, disregarding what Camp Mystic knew would be an unspeakable tragedy when the flood hit those cabins.”

Watts argued that it is not correct that FEMA was petitioned: “The bottom line is that Camp Mystic was there before FEMA was ever promulgated by Congress. It didn’t even exist. The original maps, with all due respect to the forefathers of FEMA, were kind of done on paper and crayon. It wasn’t very scientific. Now we have digital imagery. We have elevation to a 10th of an inch. We know what’s actually in a 100-year floodplain.”

While Camp Mystic sympathizes with the grieving families, “We disagree with several accusations and misinformation in the legal filings regarding the actions of Camp Mystic and Dick Eastland, who lost his life as well,” camp counsel Jeff Ray said in a statement last week.

A preventable disaster

Although camp representatives say the Eastland family prioritized the children’s safety, the narrative presented in the families’ lawsuits — which the defense has not yet formally answered to — offers a starkly different account of what happened:

In their final hours, Camp Mystic’s young campers, many of whom likely still slept with stuffed animals and needed help braiding their hair, faced a terror their parents can barely bring themselves to imagine.

As the dark waters crept across their cabin floors, inch by inch, some of the girls climbed onto their top bunks, trying to keep their heads above the rising flood, feeling the current tug at their legs.

Others spent their last panicked moments in darkness, surrounded by cries and the roar of a river that had swallowed the world outside.

Some of the campers piled into Richard “Dick” Eastland’s Tahoe, desperate to escape the neck-deep water.

His car was submerged and found the next day, appearing to have been “smashed against a tree. All inside were killed,” said the lawsuit filed by the families of five campers and two counselors.

“Their parents are left to live every single day for the rest of their lives with the intense grief de and the thoughts of what their babies endured that fateful night,” says the lawsuit filed by the families of Virginia “Wynne” Naylor, Hadley Hanna, Virginia Hollis, Jane “Janie” Hunt, Lucy Lee Dillon, and Kellyanne Lytal.

What haunts them most is the belief that their daughters didn’t have to die.

According to the lawsuits, the camp had no meaningful evacuation plan. Even as floodwaters breached the cabins, no order to flee was given until it was far too late — despite the fact that safer ground was just a few hundred feet away. A hill only 20 yards from Bubble Inn could have been reached “in a matter of seconds,” one of the lawsuits says.

Camp Mystic’s entire emergency plan fit on a single page, offering a few instructions for all potential disasters, according to the same lawsuit.

The last two lines of the document instructed children to remain inside their cabins during flooding and reassured them that “all cabins are constructed on high, safe locations.”

“To instruct children to stay in a cabin with rising flood waters was ultimately a death sentence,” the lawsuit filed by the families of the six campers says.

Watts told CNN that the camp’s decision to keep everyone sheltered in place followed long-standing safety guidance from local and national authorities, who warned against moving through floodwaters.

The parents allege that for years, the camp concealed that many cabins sat in or near dangerous floodplains, and that the camp lacked even the most basic tools like walkie-talkies, communication protocols and a real plan to protect their daughters. Counselors and campers, they say, were left to improvise.

The camp responded to the allegations outlined in the lawsuits last week.

The horrific flood was “unprecedented,” Ray said. “We intend to demonstrate and 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.”

The aftermath and denial

Camp Mystic has announced plans to partially reopen next summer for its 100th anniversary.

The section of the camp close to the Guadalupe River will remain closed. The more recent expansion, which sits uphill and was not damaged in the flooding, will reopen.

While parents remain frozen in the darkest chapter of their lives, still waking to the nightmares of what their daughters endured, still fighting for answers, they say Camp Mystic has already begun turning the page.

The lawsuit filed by the family of 9-year-old Ellen Getten says that even as families were learning to live with an empty bed, the camp was promoting its reopening, soliciting donations and preparing to return “to business as usual.” The filing calls it “not only unthinkable – it is offensive to the memories of the deceased and the families and loved ones they left behind.”

To the parents, the message felt unmistakable: the camp was ready to move on, eager to reopen its gates for summer 2026, while they remained knee-deep in grief, still fighting for the truth.

The grieving families of five other girls later joined the Getten lawsuit. Linnie Anne McCown, Abby Lynn Pohl, Margaret Gaffney Sheedy, Mary Barrett Stevens and Greta Katherine Toranzo were just 8 to 10 years old when floodwater swept them away.

“The horrifying nature of these girls’ untimely deaths cannot be overstated,” the updated lawsuit states.

“The overpowering waters cascading through the Camp … did the inevitable by tearing children away from the roofs, doors, furniture, trees, and hands of others that they clung to, and propelling them down the raging river into the inescapable darkness.”

Months after the flood, the families say they have yet to hear meaningful acknowledgment or responsibility from those in charge. The lawsuits describe an institution concerned more with its reputation than its reckoning — fixated on reopening a for-profit camp while parents struggle through a grief that has no end date.

The world may be ready to move on. But these families cannot — not until someone answers for what happened to their daughters.

CNN’s Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Pamela Brown, Shoshana Dubnow and Eric Levenson contributed to this report.

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