Camp Mystic director cries ‘we tried our hardest’ in tearful apology to families of 27 campers killed in flood
A director of the all-girls Christian camp in the Texas Hill Country where 25 campers and two counselors were killed in a 2025 flood offered a tearful apology Tuesday as state lawmakers questioned owners’ efforts to reopen in May.
Dozens of the girls’ family members sat feet behind Edward Eastland, a camp director and a member of the family that owns the 100-year-old camp along the Guadalupe River, as he told them: “We tried our hardest that night. It wasn’t enough to save your daughters.”
He added, “I’m so sorry.”
The apology came on the second day of a special legislative hearing in which state lawmakers posed tough questions about Camp Mystic’s lack of emergency planning before the devastating July 4 flood. A report of findings is expected later this year.
Eastland said he and his father Richard Eastland were on the campsite that night, and that they desperately tried to save the girls when they realized that heavy rain had created a raging flood that ripped through the camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Richard Eastland died in the flood and Edward survived only after being swept into a tree.
“These girls were our youngest campers and their amazing counselors who we watched grow up,” Eastland said. “The world was a better place with them in it and the anger at us for not being able to keep them safe is completely reasonable.”
He and several members of the Eastland family were then questioned for about four hours by state lawmakers who at times said the family remained unprepared to reopen the camp and repeatedly questioned the lack of emergency training for staff last year.
Legislators also questioned several of the decisions made during the flood that delayed an evacuation and ultimately cost lives.
Britt Eastland, another director, said the camp will dramatically improve training for counselors and stage drills for campers to prepare for floods, fire, tornadoes and intruders. Legislative investigators on Monday noted the camp’s previous lack of flood training as a critical problem that contributed to the deaths.
“All of these things should have been being done in the first place,” said Sen. Charles Perry.
The panel pressed the Eastlands on why they didn’t make a last-ditch effort to get on the camp PA system and order everyone to head to higher ground.
Edward Eastland said it didn’t even occur to him to leave the girls they were trying to rescue to go back to the camp office and make such an announcement.
“Every minute was spent trying to get to the next cabin,” he said. “If we had a little more time, we could have gotten everybody out.”
Camp Mystic’s owners want to reopen in late May and have said they will only use the parts of the camp that didn’t flood. They expect nearly 900 attendees this summer. Those plans have angered victims’ families, and some prominent state officials have called for regulators to deny or delay renewal of the camp’s license, which is under review.
