News
New Videos, Data and Reporting Give a Detailed Account of the Camp Mystic Disaster
Across Camp Mystic on the night of July 3, 195 campers settled into their bunks. Taps played over a loudspeaker shortly after 10 p.m. Dick Eastland, the 70-year-old patriarch of the family-run all girls camp, was at home in his creek-side house on the camp property, not far from the cabins.
So too was Edward Eastland, one of his sons. Edward grew up at Camp Mystic and now directs the camp along with his wife Mary Liz, living in a house even closer to the cabins and the Guadalupe River than his father.
Heavy rain was in the forecast, and camp staffers had already pulled from the water the largest boats — 20-foot-long “war canoes” — as they always did before a big rain in the flood-prone area.
What follows is the most detailed description to date of the events that took the lives of more than two dozen campers and counselors, and the elder Mr. Eastland, at the 99-year-old summer retreat.
The descriptions and rendering of those events were taken from the first interviews that Camp Mystic’s owners have granted, along with never-before-seen videos and photos taken during flooding at the camp, data from devices such as Apple watches, cell phones and vehicle crash data, and court documents from a lawsuit filed by some of the parents of children who died.
The Times visualized the water levels at the camp over the course of the night using videos and photos from the camp and estimates from a flood simulation by First Street, a nonprofit that assesses flood risk in the United States. The moving dots on the diagrams in this story show the simulated flow and depth of water at different times, and the extent of flooding.
1:14 a.m.
At 1:14 a.m. on July 4, the National Weather Service warned of potentially life-threatening flooding in the area. By that point, according to data from his phone, Dick Eastland was already up and monitoring the weather.
Around 1:45 a.m., he radioed his son, Edward. “His words were that we’ve gotten about two inches of rain in the last hour and that we need to move the waterfront equipment,” Edward Eastland told The New York Times, his first time recounting his story publicly. Members of the grounds crew went to the waterfront and pulled the remaining smaller canoes to higher ground on the hill nearer to the cabins. No one expected the water to rise that high, Edward Eastland said.
He drove to the camp office where his father and the night watchman, Glenn Juenke, were monitoring the weather. The elder Mr. Eastland checked the rain gauge that he kept at his house. A group of workers had just returned to the camp from a day off, describing a harrowing drive in the pouring rain.
2:14 a.m.
“Bubble Gum Creek is bad,” Edward Eastland texted his wife, at 2:21 a.m. “Look at the radar.” A severe thunderstorm hovered over the camp, he recalled in the interview. “Looks short tho,” she texted back, believing the heaviest rain would soon pass. “It kept saying that it would end in 30 minutes,” he recalled.
Around that time, two counselors from Bug House — a cabin of 12-year-olds closest to the river — came to the office to report water running down a steep hill into their cabin door. Edward and his father drove them back, and tried to reassure them. “At that point,” he recalled, “it was a normal flood.”
That changed quickly.
A little before 3 a.m., Edward said, a call came over the radio from a staff member in the gatehouse at the camp entrance, right along the river. “She said there’s water coming in her cabin,” he said. “She couldn’t get the door open.” Then her radio made some “very strange noises.” He could not reach her again. (The gatehouse cabin was eventually swept away in the flood; the woman survived by clinging to a tree.)
At about that time, Mr. Eastland said his father radioed from Bug House where the river was rising. “My dad said, we need to get Bug House out,” he recalled.
3:00 a.m.
The evacuation began, he said. Mr. Eastland, his father and Mr. Juenke loaded campers into each of their vehicles — two pickups and an S.U.V. — in two trips, bringing campers to the main office and directing them to walk the short distance to the recreation hall.
Counselors in a cabin further up the road, Nut Hut, watched as the evacuation took place.
The camp’s one-page safety plan, reviewed by The Times, called for them to shelter in place in a flood.
During the evacuation on July 4, the counselors were told “by the camp” not to leave their cabins, according to a lawsuit filed against Mystic. But as the water rose, the Nut Hut counselors evacuated themselves and their campers, climbing a steep hill behind their cabin.
Edward Eastland denied directing anyone to stay put during the evacuation. “When Jumble House asked me if they should walk, I said, ‘yes, go,’” he recalled, referring to another cabin.
In all, counselors in two cabins eventually evacuated on their own, climbing up the hill with their campers. Mr. Juenke helped those in a third cabin reach the hill, and then sent them up.
3:26 a.m.
“On the second trip, the water was running over the road. It was probably ankle deep,” Edward Eastland said. By then, water covered the sloping grass between the cabins and the river. Lightning crashed, revealing canoes floating over the soccer field.
Soon it was up to the top of his truck tires, he said.
At that point, Mr. Eastland and his father turned to the cabins of the youngest campers, Bubble Inn and Twins. A video, taken at 3:26 a.m. by one of the workers from a second-floor sleeping area above the commissary, captured deepening water swiftly moving past Twins, while, in the distance, campers were still able to wade through ankle and knee-deep water into the rec hall.
Mr. Juenke ended up in a cabin called Wiggle Inn, where he would ride out the rising water, with the campers and two counselors floating on inflatable mattresses. “We’re going to be OK,” Mr. Juenke recalled telling them.
3:50 a.m.
Dick Eastland parked his S.U.V. by the entrance to Bubble Inn. “He was standing outside of his Tahoe, and the water was rushing all around these cabins at this point, it was probably two or three feet,” his son said. “That’s the last place I saw him.”
Edward Eastland walked around Giggle Box and through waist-high water to the pair of connected cabins known as Twins.
“It feels like rapids at that point,” he said. He saw two counselors calling out for help from the porch. As he got to the cabin, he said he thought to himself, “we cannot get these eight-year-olds out of this cabin in this water.”
Water, he said, had never reached the cabin, not in 100 years. “It was unbelievable,” Edward Eastland recalled.
Inside the first Twins cabin, a dozen 8-year-old girls huddled in the corner together on top of two bunk beds.
“I tell them, I’m here and I’m not leaving you guys, and everything’s gonna be OK,” he said. The 11 girls in the second Twins cabin were also on the top bunks. The water at that point was rushing by the doorways and filling both cabins.
“Water started coming in through the window,” he said. “I yelled to the counselors, does anybody have a screwdriver?” Edward Eastland was thinking of trying to remove a metal vent in the low ceiling to climb through. As he moved between cabins, the counselors were yelling that the water was chest high.
“I remember seeing the waterline and just praying that it would stop going up,” he said. “And it just kept going up.”
Mr. Eastland said he was able to talk to his father on the radio, and he heard him struggling in the water.
“He said, ‘I need help. I can’t move,’” Mr. Eastland recalled. “I said, I can’t.”
Dick Eastland appeared to have been trying to get the eight-year-old girls out of Bubble Inn and into his Tahoe. It was not clear if he loaded all 13 campers and two counselors inside.
“He was right there,” Mr. Eastland recalled, standing outside the Twins cabins on a recent sunny morning, with Bubble Inn just a few steps away. But from inside the cabin that night, Mr. Eastland said he could not see him.
Then his father’s radio seemed to malfunction, Mr. Eastland said.
The water picked up Dick Eastland’s S.U.V., carrying it forcefully over the soccer field, down past the archery range and into a grove by the river, smashing the vehicle against a tall Cypress.
A data report from his vehicle, reviewed by The Times, indicated a crash at 3:51 a.m. His Apple watch showed he went underwater at the same time. He was found dead in the S.U.V., along with three campers from Bubble Inn.
Around that time, Mr. Eastland said he was in the second Twins cabin, the water at his shoulders, when a counselor yelled from the other Twins cabin that the water was carrying girls out the door.
“I’m right here in the doorway, and three girls come out of that door,” Mr. Eastland recalled, his voice shaking. “I catch two of them, and one girl gets away into the darkness.”
As he held the two girls, and gripped the doorway, the water began to rise over his head. Another camper swept from the cabin behind him grabbed onto him.
“I have no idea who it was,” he said. “She put her arms around my neck” and tried to hold on.
Then, he said, the water pushed him and the girls holding onto him from the cabin into the surging river.
Data from his Apple watch, reviewed by The Times, indicated that Mr. Eastland went underwater at 4:09 a.m.
He struggled against the current. “I could feel the pressure, like I was almost to the top,” he said, but the surface, “it just, it wasn’t there.”
The flow of the water carried Mr. Eastland alone past a row of trees along the road where an hour before he had been evacuating campers. Now the water reached the branches, which he tried to seize. But, he said, they kept breaking.
Eventually the water pushed him into the canopy of a pair of large trees, just below the Bug House cabin. He grabbed on.
Several campers and counselors from the Twins cabins were already there, clinging for their lives, Mr. Eastland said. Eight campers and three counselors survived by holding on to the same trees, he said. Another counselor survived in a tree along the road, and another camper also was found alive nearby, he said. Three more campers were later found alive down river.
The scale of the loss became clear only after the water receded, Mr. Eastland said.
Eleven campers from the two Twins cabins died in the flood. All 13 campers and both counselors who were in Bubble Inn died. Another girl was swept away after trying to return to her cabin, Jumble House, for a blanket after evacuating.
The body of one girl from Twins, Cile Steward, 8, has still not been found.
The waterlines in the cabins, measured by The Times, rose well above the heads of the campers.
In one of the Twins cabins, the lines appeared to reach the low, flat ceiling. In the other, the water stopped a few inches from the ceiling.
None of the buildings at the camp, except for the gatehouse and a wing of the commissary used for storage, were destroyed, though many were damaged. In Bubble Inn, the waterline was 6 feet 3 inches from the floor.
The riverwaters eventually surrounded and filled the first floor of the open, two-story recreation hall, where 95 campers and 15 counselors had gathered for safety, according to figures provided by Camp Mystic. They huddled on the narrow second-floor balcony that wrapped around the log-frame structure, watching beneath them the water flow through the building.
The relatives of some of the 25 campers and two counselors who died have filed lawsuits against the camp and the Eastland family, arguing that the camp had been negligent in advance of the flood and that the last-minute rescue efforts were undertaken too late.
“The Camp chose not to evacuate its campers and counselors, even as floodwater reached the cabins, until counselors demanded it,” according to one of the suits. “When it was too late, the Camp made a hopeless ‘rescue’ effort from its self-created disaster.”
In interviews with The Times, Mr. Eastland and his brother Richard, who also works and lives at the camp, said that based on decades of experience living at the camp and running it through previous floods, they believed the cabins were the safest place for the campers.
“In our minds, the cabins were built on high ground,” Richard Eastland said.
The family felt that way even after a 2011 FEMA map placed most of the cabins, including Bubble Inn and Twins, within a 100-year flood zone. The camp hired surveyors who argued there were errors in the topography used for that map; the federal agency in 2013 removed the cabins from the floodplain maps.
But the July 4 flood had changed what high ground was for the camp, Richard Eastland said.
There had been no plan for how to evacuate campers, the Eastlands said. The evacuation was improvised, as the water level rose more rapidly than they had ever seen. The camp is planning to create an evacuation plan for the future, Richard Eastland said.
And, the Eastlands said, the camp will never again use the cabins that flooded to house campers or counselors.
“No, never,” Edward Eastland said.
But next summer they plan to reopen their separate, adjacent camp – Camp Mystic Cypress Lake – that sits higher up a hill and did not flood that holiday weekend.
Some families have welcomed the news, while others, including those whose children died in the flood and the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, have criticized the camp for its decision. The Texas Legislature is planning to hold hearings on what took place at the camp though a date has not yet been announced.
Edward Eastland said he has been going to counseling. He has returned many times to the spot where his father died along with several girls from Bubble Inn, at the base of a Cypress tree, by the now-gently flowing river.
“Every morning is horrible,” he said, his voice quavering. “I want to help the families. I don’t know what to do though.”
“We are so sorry,” said his wife, Mary Liz. “I feel like no one thinks that we’re sorry.”
Methodology
Times’ journalists generated the 3-D model of Camp Mystic from high-resolution LiDAR data captured by The Times using a drone flown over the camp on Nov. 12. The flood simulation provided by First Street models water levels at the camp over the course of the night, based on rain on the night of the flood and topography in the area. Photos and videos from the camp point to water levels even higher than the simulation’s estimate.
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
transcript
transcript
Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
-
“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
By Jackeline Luna
April 20, 2026
In this photo illustration, The Onion website is displayed on a computer screen, showing a satirical story titled Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’, on November 14, 2024 in Pasadena, California.
Mario Tama/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mario Tama/Getty Images North America
The satirical website, The Onion, has a new deal to take over Infowars, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s far-right media company. If approved by a Texas judge, the deal would take away his Infowars microphone, and allow The Onion to resume its plans to turn the website into a parody of itself.
Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They’re still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgement they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children in order to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones’s followers to harass and threaten the families for years.
The families are also eager to take away Jones’s platform for spewing such conspiracy theories. The deal not only would divorce Jones from his Infowars brand, but it would turn the platform against him by allowing The Onion to mock his kind of conspiracy mongering and advocate for gun control.
The families “took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others” by using “his corrupt business platform to torment and harass them for profit,” said Chris Mattei, one of the attorneys for the families. “When Infowars finally goes dark, the machinery of lies that Jones built will become a force for social good, thanks to the families’ courage and The Onion’s vision, persistence and stewardship.”
A mourner visits the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial on the 10th anniversary of the school shooting on Dec.14, 2022 in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people were shot and killed, including 20 first graders and 6 educators, in one of the deadliest elementary school shootings in U.S. history.
John Moore/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
John Moore/Getty Images
For its part The Onion called it a “significant step in an effort to transform one of the internet’s more notorious misinformation platforms into a new comedy network for satire.” The company says it could announce its new rollout of Infowars in a matter of weeks if the judge approves the deal.
“Eight years, almost to the day, after the Sandy Hook parents first filed suit against Alex Jones, they’ll finally get some justice, and even some money,” said Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion. “This is a chance to make something genuinely new out of a very broken piece of media history.”
On its website Monday, The Onion posted a satirical message from the fictional CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder,” stating a “dream is finally coming true.”
Jones’s posted on X Monday that “The Onion Has Fraudulently Claimed AGAIN That It Owns Infowars!!!” adding that “The Democrat Party Disinformation Publication Is Publicly Bragging About Its Plan To Silence Alex Jones’ Infowars And Then Steal & Misrepresent His Identity!”
On a podcast in March, Jones alluded to the impending demise of Infowars, saying, “We’re getting shut down. We beat so many attacks. But finally, we’re shutting down like the middle of next month,” before insisting, “We’re going to be fine.”
Jones suggested Monday he would appeal any court decision to approve the leasing deal. And even if he loses control of Infowars, Jones could continue to broadcast from another studio, under another name.
Jones’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
More than a year ago, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected The Onion’s first attempt to buy Infowars through a bankruptcy auction, saying the process was flawed. Since then, the bankruptcy court clarified that because Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, is not itself in bankruptcy, its property should be handled instead by a Texas state receiver. That cleared the way for the new pending deal to lease Infowars to The Onion, with the hope that a future sale could be approved.
In papers filed in state court, the Texas receiver said he “determined that licensing the Intellectual Property is in the best interest of the receivership estate.”
The deal calls for The Onion to pay $81,000 a month to license the Infowars.com domain and brand name, which the receiver says will “cover carrying costs to preserve and protect the assets of the receivership estate” until an appeal filed by Jones is decided and the path is cleared for a sale.
Jones’s personal bankruptcy case is proceeding in federal bankruptcy court, where a trustee continues to sell off Jones’s personal property, including cars, homes, watches and guns, with proceeds intended for the families.
A memorial to massacre victims stands near the former site of Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2013 in Newtown, Connecticut, one year after Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first graders and six adults at the school.
John Moore/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
John Moore/Getty Images
-
New York6 minutes agoN.Y.P.D. Narcotics Unit Under Review After a Beating Is Caught on Tape
-
Detroit, MI36 minutes agoMI Healthy Climate Conference in Detroit focuses on green funding and strong future
-
San Francisco, CA49 minutes agoCalifornia’s New Hotel Edit: The Best Places to Stay Across the Golden State in 2026
-
Dallas, TX54 minutes agoThe Brandon Aubrey Deal | DZTV
-
Miami, FL1 hour agoRanking the Miami Heat’s Top Trade Targets
-
Boston, MA1 hour agoFormer Massachusetts doctor faces 81 new sexual assault charges
-
Denver, CO1 hour agoHouston County murder suspect returns to face charges after her arrest in Denver
-
Seattle, WA1 hour agoWest Seattle Tool Library to host annual tool sale this Saturday, April 25 | The White Center Blog