Families of seven girls and camp counselors killed in the July 4 Camp Mystic flood in Hunt, Texas, have filed a wrongful death and negligence lawsuit, alleging the camp’s owners ignored flood risks and state safety rules to protect profits.

The lawsuit, filed Nov. 10 in Travis County District Court by attorney R. Paul Yetter of Yetter Coleman LLP, names the families of Anna Margaret Bellows, Lila Bonner, Chloe Childress, Molly DeWitt, Katherine Ferruzzo, Lainey Landry and Blakely McCrory — all of whom died in the catastrophic flooding.

The 75-page petition claims Camp Mystic and its owners “put profit over safety” and “chose to house young girls in flood-prone areas to avoid the cost of relocating cabins.” It also accuses the camp of failing to create or follow an evacuation plan, despite state regulations requiring one.

“Just such a tragedy hit our State on July 4, 2025,” the lawsuit reads. “When 25 campers and two counselors needlessly and tragically died in the floodwaters at Camp Mystic.”

CAMP MYSTIC MAKES CONTROVERSIAL DECISION ABOUT FUTURE OF TEXAS CAMP WHERE 27 DIED IN FLOODING

Camp Mystic spans 725 acres along the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country, an area long known for deadly flash floods. The filing cites a 1990 interview with then-director Richard Eastland, who reportedly told the Austin-American Statesman, “I’m sure there will be other drownings. People don’t heed the warnings.”

According to the lawsuit, the camp ignored multiple warnings — from weather alerts, staff concerns, and its own experience. Counselors allegedly pleaded to evacuate girls from low-lying cabins but were told to “stay put because that’s the plan.”

TIMELINE DETAILED IN THE LAWSUIT:  

• 1:14 a.m. — National Weather Service issued a “life-threatening flash flood” warning.

• 1:45 a.m.–2:13 a.m. — Camp leaders Richard and Edward Eastland allegedly worked to move equipment instead of ordering an evacuation.

• 2:20 a.m. — Counselors reported water entering cabins but were instructed to remain inside.

• 2:30–3:30 a.m. — Five cabins were evacuated to the Rec Hall; six others were left behind, including Nut Hut, Chatter Box, Wiggle Inn, Giggle Box, Twins, and Bubble Inn.

• 3:35–3:51 a.m. — Richard Eastland’s SUV was swept away as he tried to rescue girls from Bubble Inn; all 13 campers and two counselors in that cabin drowned.

• 3:35–4:09 a.m. — Eleven campers died in Twins Cabin after being told to stay because “the water would go back down.”

CAMP MYSTIC MAKES CONTROVERSIAL DECISION ABOUT FUTURE OF TEXAS CAMP WHERE 27 DIED IN FLOODING

The petition argues that the girls could have safely evacuated within 60 seconds to higher ground if not ordered to remain in their cabins.

Families accuse Camp Mystic of gross negligence, premises liability, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The filing also highlights a written policy stating: “In case of flood, all campers on Senior Hill must stay in their cabins… All cabins are constructed on safe, high locations.”

The lawsuit also alleges that camp administrators misled families after the disaster, telling them the girls were merely “unaccounted for” hours after the floodwaters receded.

Adding to families’ anger, the lawsuit cites the camp’s decision to announce its reopening for the next summer season while one camper, Cile Steward, remained missing.

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The families are seeking more than $1 million in damages, including wrongful death and exemplary damages, and have requested a jury trial.

We all know the drill by now.

Lawmaker is in the news, lawmaker writes self-serving book, lawmaker promotes self-serving book to make a buck.

But John Fetterman is different. I have never read such a searingly candid account of what it means to struggle with depression, to the point of being suicidal.

There’s an excerpt in the Free Press, and it is riveting.

BOOK BUMMER: WHY READING IS IN DEEP DECLINE

The Pennsylvania senator has always been a character: a hulking six-foot-eight, doing interviews in hoodies, not nearly liberal enough to satisfy much of his Democratic Party.

Fetterman, you’ll recall, suffered a stroke just before he won the Democratic nomination for his seat.

His wife Gisele noticed a drooping of his mouth and took him to a nearby hospital, which, fortunately, was 10 minutes away.

The surgery saved him, but he had trouble understanding words and phrases, communicating only with an iPhone with closed-captioning.

Fetterman’s condition improved, “but in hindsight I should have quit.”

He was constantly mentioned on Fox, or under attack by Dr. Mehmet Oz and his allies: “Uncle Festerman [in an] oversize gym-rat costume,” “unfit to run,” “the guy can’t talk,” a “wax dummy,” “where does the man end and the machine.” And on social media “Vegetable. Moron. Retard.”

This got in his head: “a defining quality of depression, the building blocks of which I had probably struggled with ever since I was a kid. My parents were 19 when I was conceived, and I have always felt it was because of me that my parents were unable to follow their own dreams. When your self-image is negative, as mine was growing up, you gravitate toward shame. You gravitate toward feeling unwanted.”

“This inclination persisted even as an adult…”

“Is this my life now?”

REPUBLICANS DUB FETTERMAN ‘VOICE OF REASON’ AFTER HE ACCUSES HIS OWN PARTY OF ‘PLAYING CHICKEN’

Then came the debate against Oz. He was awful.

“This was a make-or-break moment that would determine the outcome of the election, and I had wilted. I’d choked.”

“For the entire three-and-a-half-hour ride back from the debate, I read reactions on X, shooting myself up with the shame that is too often the sustenance of the depressive…”

“For months, I was suicidal. Paranoid. Not eating. Not sleeping. Not speaking. Not functioning. Resigned. Ashamed. Despairing. Despairing everywhere I was. Up was down, and down was up.” He won anyway by 5 points.

“Once, as I lay in bed,” Fetterman said, “I asked myself, What would you do if there were a pill on the nightstand you could take and not wake up? I would have taken it.”

Gisele told him “I could not come home until I was back to being myself: The impact on our kids was just too great.” So the senator moved in with his parents.

“By February, I wasn’t eating, and I wouldn’t talk to anybody…”

“I began to feel more alive and animated than I had in months. I was present. I felt energy.”

“There were still enormous challenges, though. I was terrified to see my family.”

“A young therapist-in-training came in to talk to me one day. ‘Gisele and the kids are thinking about coming to visit,’ she said.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” The next day: “The kids are better off without me.”

“At that point, she stepped out of her professional mode and said the most important thing that has ever been said to me in my life:”

“Children need their daddy.”

The visit at a Wendy’s went well. Everyone was relaxed. He needed their love.

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I don’t care if you like John Fetterman or not, whether you think he should resign or not, whether you think he’s an awful senator or not. If you can read that without being moved, you don’t have a heart.

Depression is a scourge on our society. Many people are on all kinds of medications to try to cope with it, or in long-term therapy, or both.

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I’ve never read such a brutally candid account of what it’s like to struggle with depression, let alone from an incumbent office-holder. It certainly deepened my understanding of this deadly disease, and I hope yours as well.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

DANVILLE, Calif. — At age 106, Alice Darrow can clearly recall her days as a nurse during World War II, part of a pioneering group that dodged bullets as they hauled packs full of medical supplies and treated the burns and gunshot wounds of troops.

Some nurses were killed by enemy fire. Others spent years as prisoners of war. Most returned home to quiet lives, receiving little recognition.

Darrow sat with patients, even after-hours. One of them had arrived at her hospital on California’s Mare Island with a bullet lodged in his heart. He was not expected to survive surgery, yet he would change her life.

“To them, you’re everything because you’re taking care of them,” she said, sitting at her home in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Danville.

Eighty years after the war ended, a coalition of retired military nurses and others is campaigning to award one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal, to all nurses who served in WWII. Other groups, such as the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WWII and the real-life Rosie the Riveters, have already received the honor.

“The general public doesn’t often recognize, I think, the contribution that the nurses have made in pretty much every war,” said Patricia Upah, a retired colonel who served as an Army nurse in conflicts abroad, and whose late mother was also a Army nurse in the South Pacific in World War II.

Only a handful, like Darrow, are still alive. The coalition knows of five World War II nurses who are still living — including Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo, 107, who became the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps. They fear time is running out to honor the trailblazers.

“It’s high time we honor the nurses who stepped up and did their part to defend our freedom,” U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, said in a statement.

Baldwin and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, have sponsored legislation to award the medal, but it faces steep odds. It needs two-thirds of each chamber — 67 cosponsors in the Senate and 290 in the House — and so far, the bills have eight and six cosponsors, respectively.

Before the war, there were fewer than 600 nurses with the U.S. Army and 1,700 with the U.S. Navy. By the end of the war, those numbers had ballooned to 59,000 in the Army and 14,000 in the Navy.

The Congressional bills cite harrowing examples of bravery. Some nurses served on Navy hospital ships treating patients as the vessels came under fire. Sixty nurses landed off the coast of North Africa on Nov. 8, 1942, to set up shop and care for invading troops.

“Without weapons, they waded ashore amid enemy sniper fire and ultimately took shelter in an abandoned civilian hospital,” the legislation states.

The nurses saved lives. Fewer than 4% of U.S. soldiers in WWII who received medical care in the field or underwent evacuation died from wounds or disease, the legislation states.

“They probably saw more infections. They probably saw more chemical casualties. Remember, they didn’t have disposable products, so they had to sterilize everything,” says Edward Yackel, a retired colonel and president of the Army Nurse Corps Association, of World War II nurses.

“Without them,” he says, “we would not have the knowledge base we need now to fight the wars of today.”

Some nurses endured harsh captivity. In 1942, nearly 80 military nurses were captured when the U.S. surrendered the Philippines to Japan. Held as prisoners of war, the women endured starvation rations and disease but continued to work until their liberation three years later.

Nurses played outsized roles in 600 U.S. Army hospitals worldwide and 700 prisoner-of-war camps at military bases in the U.S., said Phoebe Pollitt, a retired nurse and professor of nursing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. But their role has largely gone unrecognized.

“Within even women’s history and health care history, nurses are kind of at the bottom of the barrel,” she said.

The majority of military nurses were white, and those who were not often had to fight for the right to serve.

In 1941, only 56 Black nurses were allowed into the U.S. Army. Japanese American applicants, whose families were incarcerated during the war, were not accepted into the Army Nurse Corps until 1943.

Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo was born in Stockton, California, but spent her teens China. She joined the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps in unoccupied China after fleeing Japanese forces in Hong Kong.

She later applied to the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, but they said she had an obligation to serve her country — and that meant China.

An indignant Chinese American medical officer fired off a letter on Seetoo’s behalf, stating that she was a U.S. citizen. She became the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps, working in China and India before returning to the U.S.

She already has a Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Chinese Americans for their service in the war despite the discrimination they faced.

“We answered the call to duty when our country faced threats to our freedom,” she said in video recorded remarks at the 2020 ceremony.

Among the patients Darrow cared for was a young soldier wounded in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Before surgery to remove the bullet in his heart, he asked if she would go on a date with him, if he made it through.

“I said, ‘Well sure, you can count on me,’” she says, and laughs. “I couldn’t say, ‘No, I don’t think you’re going to make it.’”

Dean Darrow did survive and they did go out. The couple kept the 7.7 mm bullet. They married and raised four children. He died in 1991.

In September, Alice Darrow took a cruise to Hawaii with her daughter and son-in-law, where she donated the bullet to the Pearl Harbor National Memorial so visitors from around the world could learn of its significance and the love story behind it.

Darrow said she’s looking forward to seeing the bullet on display. The Congressional Gold Medal would be another treasure to look forward to.

“It would be an honor,” she said.

___

Terry Tang of AP’s race and ethnicity team contributed from Phoenix, Arizona.

Washington — It’s a Veterans Day they won’t soon forget. 

On a balmy 70-degree day in the nation’s capital this past weekend, former President Barack Obama boarded an Honor Flight filled with veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars that had just touched down from Madison, Wisconsin. 

“Hello, everybody,” his voiced boomed over the loud speaker. 

“What!” exclaimed one person. Another veteran gasped, his mouth wide open.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” the former president continued in a moment captured on video.

Seventy-nine veterans and their families made the trip.

Obama shook hands with them as they exited the aircraft and presented them with a Presidential Challenge Coin, a token to express his personal gratitude for their sacrifices.

“Ahead of Veterans Day, I was honored to welcome a flight of veterans and their families as they arrived in D.C.,” Obama said in a statement.  “To all those who bravely served our country, thank you to you and your family for your extraordinary service. The sacrifices that all of you made to protect our country will be honored, today and every day.”

The Honor Flight Networks is a national non-profit organization that provides free flights to veterans to visit Washington-area monuments. It initially focused on World War II-era veterans but has expanded its mission to include veterans from the Korean and Vietnam Wars and other tours of duty.

“I had tears in my eyes,” said Army veteran Joe Parr. “I just couldn’t believe that there were that many people around that remembered us and was there to greet us and it was just unbelievable!” 

The Honor Flight program has been in operation for 20 years and has served more than 317,000 veterans, according to its website.

“It started off very small and now a lot of states have their own hubs and they raise their own money and they set up the whole flights,” said Capt. Mary Quigley, a Navy veteran and Honor Flight volunteer.

The operators of Camp Mystic in Texas, where 25 girls and two teenage counselors died in catastrophic flooding on July 4, failed to take necessary steps to protect the campers as life-threatening floodwaters approached, families of the victims allege in a lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in state court in Austin, seeks more than $1 million in damages but does not specify an exact amount. It was filed as Camp Mystic has drawn renewed outrage from several victims’ families over plans to reopen the 100-year-old camp next summer.

Among the claims in the lawsuit is that a groundskeeper was directed to spend more than an hour evacuating equipment while girls and counselors in cabins closest to the Guadalupe River were ordered to remain there, even as floodwaters overwhelmed the property.

The lawsuit was filed by the families of five campers and the two counselors who died.

“These young girls died because a for-profit camp put profit over safety,” the lawsuit said. “The camp chose to house young girls in cabins sitting in flood-prone areas, despite the risk, to avoid the cost of relocating the cabins.”

The suit also alleges the operators of the camp chose not to make plans to safely evacuate campers, despite state rules requiring such plans, and instead ordered campers and counselors to remain in their cabins as a matter of policy.

Defendants named in the lawsuit include Camp Mystic, affiliated entities and its owners, including the estate of camp owner Richard Eastland, who also died in the flooding, and his family members.

A separate lawsuit with similar allegations was filed Monday by the family of Eloise Peck, another Camp Mystic camper who died in the flood. Both lawsuits were filed in Travis County.

An attorney for Camp Mystic said in a statement that they empathize with the families who lost loved ones in the flood, but they disagree with “several accusations and misinformation” in the legal filings.

“We intend to demonstrate and prove that this sudden surge of floodwaters far exceeded any previous flood in the area by several magnitudes, that it was unexpected and that no adequate warning systems existed in the area,” said Jeff Ray, legal counsel for Camp Mystic.

The campers and counselors were killed when the fast-rising floodwaters roared through a low-lying area of the summer camp before dawn on the Fourth of July. All told, the destructive flooding killed at least 136 people, raising questions about how things went so terribly wrong.

County leaders were asleep or out of town. The head of Camp Mystic had been tracking the weather beforehand, but it’s now unclear whether he saw an urgent warning from the National Weather Service that had triggered an emergency alert to phones in the area, a spokesperson for the camp’s operators said in the immediate aftermath.

The camp, established in 1926, did not evacuate and was hit hard when the river rose from 14 feet (4.2 meters) to 29.5 feet (9 meters) within 60 minutes.

Ryan DeWitt, whose daughter Molly DeWitt was one of the campers killed in the flooding, said in a statement that the lawsuit is a step toward helping the family find peace.

“We trust that through this process, light will be shed on what happened, and our hope is that justice will pave the way for prevention and much-needed safety reform,” DeWitt said.

The deaths of the campers and counselors, and the gut-wrenching testimony from their parents to Texas lawmakers, led to a series of new laws designed to prevent similar tragedies in the future.