The water rushing through Camp Mystic in the pre-dawn darkness of July 4 in Texas Hill Country had a force that nearly knocked Glenn Juenke off his feet.
Thunder crashed simultaneously with flashes of lightning. Several cabins of girls had already been safely shepherded to a nearby two-story recreation building. The Wiggle Inn was next. But as the murky, churning water rose, Mr. Juenke, the camp’s night security guard, realized it was too dangerous to evacuate the cabin. The young campers would have to ride out the storm where they were, in waterlogged bunks, and then on inflatable camping mattresses, amid floating debris.
Mr. Juenke’s account of his actions during the deadly flooding at Camp Mystic represents the most detailed firsthand description yet of what senior staff members at the camp did as the Guadalupe River surged over its banks in Kerr County this summer. Twenty-five young campers and two teenage counselors died along with Dick Eastland, the 70-year-old patriarch of the family that owns the camp.
Trapped in a cabin full of petrified children, Mr. Juenke, a retired officer from the Houston Police Department, said he “just started thinking what I would always tell my kids,” as he left on patrol each day, “which was that I’m coming home at the end of my shift.”
“Because,” he continued, recounting his story for the first time over several interviews, “if I show that I am scared to death, that’s not going to do any good for the 9-year-old girls who were terrified.”
He added, “I was terrified, too.”
The water reached Mr. Juenke’s knees, then moved over his waist to his chest. Soon it was too deep to stand. The girls held hands, crowding onto about a half-dozen inflatable mattresses, sometimes screaming as their trunks crashed around the cabin and clumps of angry, stinging fire ants rode by on the waves of dark water. A counselor led them in prayer.
Mr. Juenke struggled to keep the fear from overwhelming him. “I did have tunnel vision, and in the tunnel vision was all the little girls in the cabin,” he said.
Others who were at the camp during the flood, and a spokesman for the camp in the aftermath, have described events that align with the account offered by Mr. Juenke of what took place in and around the Wiggle Inn.
The Texas Legislature announced this week that it would begin a formal investigation of what took place during the July flooding at Camp Mystic and along the Guadalupe River. At least 135 people died along the river and the bodies of two victims, including an 8-year-old camper, Cile Steward, have still not been recovered.
“The families who lost their precious daughters deserve answers, as do all Texans, on exactly what happened,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, in a statement announcing the investigation. “Camp Mystic has not spoken publicly on the record as to what happened that morning.”
The legislative investigation would be the first into the flood event at Camp Mystic, a picturesque, nearly century-old, all-girls camp nestled in a bend of the Guadalupe River that has long attracted wealthy and well-connected Texas families. The camp is planning to partially reopen next summer at a portion of its grounds that did not flood.
The Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, which has jurisdiction in the area, did not conduct its own inquiry. In response to a public records inquiry for investigatory reports related to the camp, the office said that no such records existed.
“They should have interviewed me already,” Mr. Juenke told The New York Times. “No one has.”
The night of the flood has taken a toll on Mr. Juenke, as it has on the families of the dead and the survivors. He has been hit by waves of grief and anger, including an outburst at Mr. Patrick when the lieutenant governor visited the camp a few days after the flood. Mr. Juenke began seeing a counselor.
A trim, 57-year-old who volunteers as a firefighter in nearby Hunt, Texas, his heart — “broken,” he said — began giving out in the weeks after the flood, requiring a pacemaker.
Much of what happened to those who died at Camp Mystic that morning remains a mystery. All but one of the 28 deaths were among those assigned to two sets of cabins, Bubble Inn and Twins, which were not closest to the river. In fact, the cabins, which held the youngest campers, were a short walk from the recreation hall, where scores other girls were taken and survived.
Mr. Eastland died in his Chevy Tahoe trying to rescue girls from Bubble Inn. His son, Edward Eastland, was swept away from Twins — a pair of attached cabins — and survived by grabbing onto a tree down river, where he was found with several girls, Mr. Juenke said.
Not far from those two cabins, Mr. Juenke rode out the storm with the girls of Wiggle Inn.
Mr. Juenke, who spent 25 years as a Houston police officer before serving briefly as the police chief in the town of Ingram, Texas, began working nighttime security at Camp Mystic in the summer of 2022. On drop-off days, he would wear a shirt with the word “Nightwatch” and joke with parents that he would see their daughters only if they tried to sneak out.
He carried a handgun, mostly for snakes, and most nights, after lights out for the campers, he drove around in a quiet electric golf cart. Nothing much happened.
When Mr. Juenke arrived at work around 10 p.m. on July 3, the big issue at the camp was not the forecast of rain. Staff members had already moved up the canoes and other things that might float away if the river rose, he said. Instead, he was told about a group of young Polish workers at the camp whose van broke down during a day off in the Hill Country. A second van went out to pick them up.
Mr. Juenke rode on the golf cart to survey the camp as usual, and noticed the rain starting after midnight. He said he was driving on the camp’s small golf course, along the river, and did not have cell or Wi-Fi service at 1:14 a.m. when the National Weather Service sent its first flash flood warning in Kerr County.
The Polish workers returned around 1:45 a.m., Mr. Juenke said, after a harrowing drive. The roads had been passable, but by then the rain had become intense.
“Lightning and thunder, on top of each other,” Mr. Juenke recalled. “It was like, ‘boom, boom, boom, boom.’”
He called his wife to tell her that he would be staying through the night, past the end of his shift. He said he was in the office along with Dick Eastland and other staff members, watching local flood and rain gauges. Most of the cabins were close by.
At around 2:20 a.m., he said, a counselor from the cabin closest to the river came into the office to report water coming into the windows of her cabin — the rain was blowing sideways, Mr. Juenke said, it was not the rising river.
The counselor was told that the campers should get their belongings off the floor and stay put, “because that’s the plan,” Mr. Juenke said.
The emergency plan he was referring to called for sheltering in cabins during flooding, which was not unusual at the riverside retreat. It was posted around the campus, kept by the counselors, and it was inspected by state officials on July 2.
About 10 minutes after the counselor left, around 2:30 a.m., staff members in the office decided to begin evacuating cabins. “Dick, Edward and I went down to the three cabins closest to the water — Bug House, Look Inn and Hangout — and we began evacuation,” Mr. Juenke said. “We put them in our trucks and took them to the rec hall.”
By the time they turned to the cabins closest to the recreation hall, Mr. Juenke decided it was too dangerous to continue driving in the rising water.
“What Dick and Edward said to each other, I do not know,” he said. “I just said, ‘I’m not taking the truck down, I can’t do it.’” (Edward Eastland has not responded to requests for comment.)
Mr. Juenke watched the elder Mr. Eastland drive his Tahoe toward Bubble Inn.
After helping one more cabin of girls climb to higher ground, Mr. Juenke went on foot to Wiggle Inn.
Water soon rose above the steps of the cabin. They could not make it to the recreation hall, he determined. The camp’s mattresses, old and waterlogged, sank to the ground. He stood on those, he said. But many of girls brought their own inflatable mattresses. Those floated.
“We’re not going anywhere,” he yelled above the raging water. “We’re going to be OK.”
“It’s a new activity,” he offered, “pool party at the Wiggle Inn after midnight.”
Mr. Juenke said he tried to use his cellphone to call for help, to no avail. His radio was waterlogged and nonfunctional, he said. He said he worked to keep all the girls floating together — 15 campers and two counselors, he said — in the center of the cabin.
The water kept rising. A pickup truck floated by. “Mr. Glenn, there goes your mom’s truck,” he recalls one of the girls said. It crashed into a nearby telephone poll and was lodged there, its hazard lights flashing into the cabin.
At one point, the water appeared to go down. Then suddenly the direction of the water changed. Mr. Juenke feared the campers could be sucked out of the cabin. He yelled for them to hold together.
Then, the sound of the rain stopped. The water in the cabin receded. The first glimmers of morning light were visible, he said. When they emerged from the cabin, they saw debris covering the field around the cabins, Mr. Juenke said, broken glass, papers, computers from the office, utensils and plates from the dining hall, patio furniture from upriver homes.
He learned from the other staff members that dozens of campers had gone missing, including all of Bubble Inn, many from Twins and his boss and friend, Dick Eastland.
“I’m a big crier, a big crier,” he said. “And I’m too numb to cry.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Mr. Juenke tried to wave off the experience, as he had when he was a police officer. But, he said, he can’t stop thinking about the campers and counselors who did not make it.
“I’ve what if-ed this a lot in my mind,” he said. “What if I did go somewhere else? What if I did go to Bubble Inn first?”
In the months since, he has tried to piece together, for himself and in counseling, what happened in the darkness. But, he said, “it’s a blur. It happened so fast.”
He now wears a trio of necklaces as a memorial to the camp and to the flood. One is a cross that once belonged to Dick Eastland, given to Mr. Juenke by his widow. The others were gifts from the families of the girls he saved, including one with an inscription.
“Fear not for I am with you,” it reads. “Wiggle Inn.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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