Search warrant affidavits show the Texas Rangers believe Camp Mystic leadership committed manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and child abandonment when 27 girls and counselors died in the July 4, 2025 Guadalupe River flood.
Texas investigators are moving closer to criminal charges in the deadliest youth-camp disaster in the state's history. Search warrant affidavits unsealed this week show the Texas Rangers believe the leadership of Camp Mystic committed crimes -- including manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and child abandonment -- when 27 girls and counselors died in the July 4, 2025 flood on the Guadalupe River.
The documents describe 14 warrants approved by a Kerr County state district judge on Friday. Investigators are seeking electronic and digital data from members of the Eastland family, which has run the camp for generations, along with other camp staff.
No one has been arrested and no charges have been filed. Even so, the language in the affidavits is the clearest signal yet that the state's criminal inquiry has moved well past a routine review of how the flood was handled.
In the sworn filings, a Texas Ranger investigator wrote that the offenses in question were committed against child campers, including both the girls who died and the campers who survived the flood. The warrants seek access to Apple account data belonging to camp owner and executive director Willetta "Tweety" Eastland; her husband Richard "Dick" Eastland, also an owner and executive director, who was killed in the flood; and other family members and staff.
Search warrants are investigative tools, not charges. A judge must still find that investigators showed probable cause to believe a crime occurred, and any formal accusation would come later, typically through a grand jury. The affidavits nonetheless lay out a theory of the case that centers on decisions made before the water rose and in the hours after.
That distinction matters in a case built on a natural disaster. Prosecutors pursuing negligence or recklessness in a flood must show that camp leaders knew, or should have known, what the river was about to do and failed to act on it.
Camp Mystic sits on the Guadalupe River in Hunt, in the Texas Hill Country, and has hosted generations of girls for summer sessions on the water. On July 4, 2025, the river surged overnight after heavy rain upstream. Twenty-five campers and two counselors died at the camp. Countywide, the flooding killed 119 people.
A state-led review found the camp had no state-required written emergency plans and inadequate evacuation measures at the time of the flood. A 115-page report produced for the Legislature described cascading failures: communication lapses between state and local authorities, and instructions to counselors that left them without clear guidance on how to move campers to safety.
The Guadalupe surge ranks among the deadliest flash-flood events in modern American history, and it is a reminder of how quickly rising water turns an ordinary summer day into a mass-casualty event. The same dynamic played out this year in flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border that killed dozens and left hundreds missing.
Camp Mystic had planned to reopen in a limited footprint away from the hardest-hit areas and expected more than 800 girls. In April, the camp withdrew its application for a license to operate and announced it would not reopen. It later sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of Texas, a move that complicates the civil litigation already underway.
Attorneys Paul Yetter and Richard Mithoff, who represent families of campers killed in the flood, called the search warrants a step toward transparency and accountability.
"These warrants show that decisions made by camp leadership before and during the flood may have been criminal," the attorneys said in a statement. "Twenty-seven girls should be alive today, and we will not stop seeking answers. This is a necessary step in that process."
The criminal inquiry runs alongside a separate civil fight. In February, families who lost daughters in the flood sued the Texas Department of State Health Services, arguing the agency wrongfully licensed the camp. Those civil claims have continued even as the camp's bankruptcy proceeds.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, have faced their own scrutiny. Reporting this year found that over six decades the Legislature repeatedly declined to pass flood protections aimed at the state's most flood-prone areas, leaving local officials and private operators to prepare as best they could.
The next step belongs to prosecutors in Kerr County and to a grand jury that would weigh whether the evidence gathered through the warrants supports charges. Electronic records pulled from Apple accounts can establish who knew what, and when -- messages, weather alerts received, and decisions logged in the hours before the river crested.
Families of the 27 victims have said the process will not close the case for them regardless of the outcome. The coming months will show whether the state believes it can prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that leadership failures before and during the flood crossed the line from tragic to criminal.
For the Hill Country, the larger question is unchanged: whether Texas rewrites the rules for camps, warning systems and riverside development before the next flood season arrives.
Search warrant affidavits show the Texas Rangers believe Camp Mystic leadership committed manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and child abandonment when 27 girls and counselors died in the July 4, 2025 Guadalupe River flood.
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