Families accuse Camp Mystic of ignoring risks in Texas lawsuit over flood deaths

The operators of Camp Mystic in Texas, where 25 girls and two teenage counselors died in catastrophic flooding on July 4, failed to take necessary steps to protect the campers as life-threatening floodwaters approached, families of the victims allege in a lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in state court in Austin, seeks more than $1 million in damages but does not specify an exact amount. It was filed as Camp Mystic has drawn renewed outrage from several victims’ families over plans to reopen the 100-year-old camp next summer.

Among the claims in the lawsuit is that a groundskeeper was directed to spend more than an hour evacuating equipment while girls and counselors in cabins closest to the Guadalupe River were ordered to remain there, even as floodwaters overwhelmed the property.

The lawsuit was filed by the families of five campers and the two counselors who died.

“These young girls died because a for-profit camp put profit over safety,” the lawsuit said. “The camp chose to house young girls in cabins sitting in flood-prone areas, despite the risk, to avoid the cost of relocating the cabins.”

The suit also alleges the operators of the camp chose not to make plans to safely evacuate campers, despite state rules requiring such plans, and instead ordered campers and counselors to remain in their cabins as a matter of policy.

Defendants named in the lawsuit include Camp Mystic, affiliated entities and its owners, including the estate of camp owner Richard Eastland, who also died in the flooding, and his family members.

A separate lawsuit with similar allegations was filed Monday by the family of Eloise Peck, another Camp Mystic camper who died in the flood. Both lawsuits were filed in Travis County.

Telephone and email messages left Monday with an attorney for Camp Mystic seeking comment on the lawsuit were not immediately returned.

The campers and counselors were killed when the fast-rising floodwaters roared through a low-lying area of the summer camp before dawn on the Fourth of July. All told, the destructive flooding killed at least 136 people, raising questions about how things went so terribly wrong.

County leaders were asleep or out of town. The head of Camp Mystic had been tracking the weather beforehand, but it’s now unclear whether he saw an urgent warning from the National Weather Service that had triggered an emergency alert to phones in the area, a spokesperson for the camp’s operators said in the immediate aftermath.

The camp, established in 1926, did not evacuate and was hit hard when the river rose from 14 feet (4.2 meters) to 29.5 feet (9 meters) within 60 minutes.

Ryan DeWitt, whose daughter Molly DeWitt was one of the campers killed in the flooding, said in a statement that the lawsuit is a step toward helping the family find peace.

“We trust that through this process, light will be shed on what happened, and our hope is that justice will pave the way for prevention and much-needed safety reform,” DeWitt said.

The deaths of the campers and counselors, and the gut-wrenching testimony from their parents to Texas lawmakers, led to a series of new laws designed to prevent similar tragedies in the future.