Texas Rangers Seek Manslaughter Evidence Against Camp Mystic Leadership Over 27 Flood Deaths

Texas Rangers investigator Brant Johnston has obtained 14 search warrants targeting the electronic communications of Camp Mystic's owners, the Eastland family, and other camp staff, according to affidavits reported by The New York Times and confirmed by the Texas Tribune, CNN and The Guardian. A Kerr County state district judge approved the warrants last week. No charges have been filed against anyone.

The warrants seek evidence of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, child abandonment or other crimes tied to the deaths of 25 campers and two teenage counselors at the all-girls Christian camp on the Guadalupe River. Camp owner Richard Eastland also died in the flood. Across Kerr County and the surrounding stretch of river, the flooding killed 119 people locally and at least 136 total, according to the Texas Tribune and CNN.

Johnston wrote in the affidavit that Camp Mystic had inadequate emergency plans, failed to run emergency drills or training, and in some cabins didn't have enough adult counselors on hand. He alleged camp leadership monitored late-night flood warnings but did not move children out of low-lying cabins. "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," Johnston wrote, concluding that "Camp Mystic, LLC was aware of and consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death to the campers in their care."

These are allegations in a search warrant affidavit, not findings of a court or a grand jury. Investigators are still gathering evidence, and a representative for the camp did not return messages seeking comment, per CNN and The Guardian. The Eastland family and other camp staff have not publicly responded to the specific allegations in the warrants.

What The State's Own Probe Found

The Rangers' investigation isn't happening in a vacuum. A state-led review already found Camp Mystic lacked the state-required written emergency plans and adequate evacuation measures at the time of the flood, according to the Texas Tribune. Separately, a legislature-commissioned 115-page report by Casey Garrett and Michael Massengale found "cascading failures," including communication breakdowns between state and local authorities and weak instructions to counselors on how to evacuate safely.

Families of victims have been pushing for accountability since the flood. Attorneys Christina Yarnell and Brad Beckworth, representing the family of victim Cile Steward, said in a statement that "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," and accused the family of withholding information. Steward's body has still not been recovered.

Houston attorneys Paul Yetter and Richard Mithoff, who represent other families in a separate lawsuit against the Texas Department of State Health Services over the camp's licensing, called the search warrants "a step towards transparency and accountability." Camp Mystic did not reopen this year. It withdrew its license application in April and has since filed for bankruptcy reorganization.

The Broader Failure Nobody Wants To Own

David Richardson, who ran FEMA as its senior political appointee during the floods, argues in the Daily Signal that the criminal case, whatever it finds, sidesteps a much older problem: federal flood maps and the National Flood Insurance Program make it easy for people to build and live in objectively dangerous floodplains. Richardson notes a nearly identical flood killed 10 young campers near the Guadalupe back in 1987, and that FEMA itself describes its flood maps as "snapshots in time" that identify insurance risk zones rather than predict where flooding will actually happen.

Richardson's argument deserves to be weighed on its own terms rather than dismissed as an attempt to deflect blame from camp leadership. A stalled storm dumping rain onto limestone hills in the middle of the night is a natural disaster no camp administrator can fully control. Richardson is right that no flood map could have stopped the water. But the state's own investigators, in the same reporting, found specific, documented failures at the camp level: no written emergency plan, no drills, insufficient counselors, and a decision not to relocate kids from low cabins despite monitoring the warnings overnight. Those are two different failures happening at the same time, not competing explanations for the same one.

The unresolved question is whether Kerr County prosecutors will actually bring charges once the Rangers finish combing through the Eastlands' texts, emails and internal records, and whether any charges would reach individuals or just the corporate entity, Camp Mystic LLC. Neither the Rangers nor the Kerr County district attorney's office has set a timeline for concluding the investigation.