Investigators in Texas executed search warrants last week against the family that runs Camp Mystic as part of a criminal inquiry into the 28 deaths there during last year’s flooding, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
The documents outlined why Texas state police investigators believe the camp may be criminally liable for the actions of its leadership, including for manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and child abandonment.
“These offenses were committed against child campers — including both deceased victims and surviving campers of the flood event,” an investigator from the Texas Rangers, Brant C. Johnston, wrote in affidavits.
So far, no one in the camp’s leadership has been charged with a crime, and the existence of the warrants does not mean charges would automatically follow. It was not clear when, or if, a case against the camp would be presented to a grand jury.
The warrants — of which there are 14 — allowed Texas state police investigators to search electronic data belonging to members of the Eastland family, who runs the camp, as well as data belonging to several counselors and other employees. The warrants were approved by a state court judge and filed in Kerr County on Friday.
The actions the Eastland family took before and during the flooding at the camp on July 4, 2025, have been at the center of numerous lawsuits and the criminal inquiry. The camp, which did not reopen this year, is also currently in court for a bankruptcy proceeding. The warrants, and the affidavits filed with them, provided the clearest window yet into what criminal liability the camp, and the Eastlands, may face.
Mr. Johnston said he began his inquiry in March — about eight months after the floods — and that he had made several visits to the camp. But he said he “was refused in the attempt to conduct interviews” with several Eastland family members, including those who had leadership roles in the camp. People who declined to be interviewed at that time included Edward Eastland; his wife, Mary Liz Eastland; his brother, Richard Eastland Jr.; and the camp’s night security guard, Glenn Juenke.
Mr. Johnston obtained search warrants for their Apple devices. He said in his affidavit seeking data from Edward Eastland that investigators believed the data contained “evidence demonstrating a conscious disregard of recognized risks or reckless deviation from standard safety protocols.”
“Under Texas law, a person who has assumed care, custody or control of a child may be held criminally responsible for an omission that causes injury to that child,” Mr. Johnston wrote.
A camp spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The camp, which sits along the Guadalupe River, did not have a safety plan that called for evacuations of cabins in the area that flooded last summer. The plan focused instead on sheltering in place and had not been changed since 1976, Mr. Johnston wrote, citing an interview with Tweety Eastland, the wife of the camp’s executive director at the time, Dick Eastland.
But there was a plan for evacuations in a separate part of the camp, known as Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, which sits farther from the river, which, Mr. Johnston wrote, “demonstrates that Camp Mystic LLC recognized flooding as a hazard capable of requiring campers to leave their cabins.” (The Cypress Lake area of the camp did not flood last year.)
The Eastlands, who owned the camp for decades, have said that the river had flooded before but never anywhere close to the levels it reached last summer. Mr. Eastland was one of three people — including his father, Dick, and Mr. Juenke — who tried to evacuate the cabins as the waters rose in the middle of the night.
Twenty-five campers, two counselors and Dick Eastland died in the floods. They were among 139 people who died in the floods last summer, most of them in Kerr County.
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