Clinging to trees, screaming for help: Lawsuits paint heartbreaking picture of girls’ last moments at Camp Mystic

CNN ^ | Nov 18, 2025 | Alaa Elassar, Holly Yan

[CondoleezzaProtege]

The lawsuit filed by the family of 9-year-old Ellen Getten says that even as families were learning to live with an empty bed, the camp was promoting its reopening, soliciting donations and preparing to return “to business as usual.”

[Governor Dinwiddie]

It was a horrible natural disaster.

It was nobody's fault. An act of nature. Might as well sue God.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Clearly you didn’t read the profoundly obvious points of human culpability in the matter. The cabins were not up to code and the codes were intentionally evaded since 2013.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

One of those little weather alert radios would have come in handy.

[Fledermaus]

No code could have helped in that once a century flash flood.

In May 2010 we had the same type rain in middle TN. Hundreds of houses gone. Downtown Nashville flooded from the Cumberland River up to 7th Avenue.

No code violations.

It happens.

[The_Media_never_lie]

Not wise to have cabins in 100 year flood plane with no escape plan. Just not excusable.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

The location of a select group of cabins was inexcusable given the extensive knowledge of the geology the camp-owner had, the casualties of neighboring camps in floods like the one in 1987, and his own lobbying for flood alert systems over the decades.

[Deaf Smith]

>>It was nobody’s fault.

I and many others watched on radar that dense low pressure system (remains of a Pacific hurricane) as it entered the Big Bend from Mexico moving east and then to the Trans Pecos and Hill Country.

I have screens shots that I text to another FReeper.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

All my life I've been reading about people camping in a draw or arroyo. Then a thunderstorm
dozens of miles of way sends a torrent and wipes away the campers. It is not a rare occurrence.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

The once in a century excuse doesn’t work because there were prior floods and prior casualties at neighboring camps in years past that the owner was well aware of, the same way he was aware of the volatile location some (not all) of the cabins were in by the riverbank.

None of the counselors were properly trained or drilled in case of any emergency…To the contrary were told basically to stay put.

Texas officials acknowledge that funding for flood alert systems and repeated lobbying on behalf of updating them went ignored.

[FlingWingFlyer]

This sounds like it was written by two of CNN’s foreign scumbags. More liberal sob stories.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Numerous Texas publications as well as *Republican* TX lawmakers have acknowledged culpability both at the camp level and state/local level.

[The_Media_never_lie]

A so called 100 year flood is more accurately a 30-40 year flood.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Weather alert radios are a low tech but reliable means of getting warnings. Cell phones will give
you a warning too, but I bet cell phone coverage was poor at that location. Unfortunately such a
flood was far far from anyone's mind.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

[CondoleezzaProtege]

And I don’t think your Nashville example is the same as:

Most of the cabins had been located in FEMA’s 100-year “Special Flood Hazard Area” up until 2013. That’s when the camp petitioned FEMA to remove most of the cabins from floodplain maps, says the lawsuit filed by the families of five campers and two counselors. The move did nothing but spare the Eastlands costly insurance premiums and expensive renovations, the filing states.

[lastchance]

So reporting on the death of those children is nothing more than a “Liberal sob story.”

G-d alone knows if you are as truly awful as you appear in that post.

[lightman]

Not to mention that the only person “authorized” to sound the emergency alert was on vacation or otherwise indisposed with no plan for a second in command.

[No name given]

Obviously.

[gundog]

Drive pilings and put the cabins 25 feet in the air. Tell the girls it’s because of bears. Everyone’s happy.