Texas officials have faulted Camp Mystic's top medical officer for abandoning campers in the hours before 25 young girls and two camp counselors were killed in a devastating flood. The Texas Board of Nursing announced the finding on Tuesday in an order temporarily suspending Mary Liz Eastland's nursing license.
The order said Eastland, a co-director who also served as the camp's medical officer, 'abandoned the campers and staff when the camp site began to flood ... by evacuating herself and her children to higher ground without providing any assistance or direction to all of the other campers and staff.'
The order also faults Eastland for failing to develop and maintain adequate emergency plans and training protocols before the deadly July 4 floods, and failing to keep adequate shelter and evacuation protocols. The nursing board argued that those failures are even more egregious considering Eastland 'should have been aware of Camp Mystic's experiences during previous catastrophic flooding events,' according to ABC 13.
Many of the cabins at the all-girls Christian camp - including those that housed some of the youngest campers - had been built on federally-designated flood zones and floodways along the Guadalupe River, areas considered so hazardous that construction is typically restricted or prohibited entirely.
But the nursing board considered more than just Eastland's conduct ahead of the flood in its decision to temporarily suspend her license. Prior to the flood, the order alleges Eastland 'inappropriately delegated the authorization for staff nurses to assess, diagnose and administer [medication] to campers without prior physician assessment and recommendation.' She further allegedly 'failed to ensure staff distributed medication in compliance with HIPAA requirements' and 'failed to ensure medications were safely stored in a lockable cabinet or other secure location that was not accessible to campers.'
Taken together, the board wrote that Eastland's conduct was likely to 'injure campers and staff, and it created an unsafe environment and may have exposed campers and staff to physical harm, emotional harm, psychological harm and loss of life.' The board then decided that allowing Eastland to keep practicing nursing would constitute a 'continuing and imminent threat to public welfare.'
But Joshua Fiveson, an attorney for Camp Mystic, said Eastland rejects the allegations. He said the board suspended her license with less than a day's notice of a hearing and 'without the benefit of testimony, evidence or a complete investigation.' 'Mrs Eastland has admirably committed herself to service of others for the last 18 years,' he told the Texas Tribune. 'This was an exercise in premature punishment. But judgments should not precede process in an ordered system of justice.'
The nursing board's order, however, noted that its staff presented evidence and information about Eastland's conduct during a public meeting on Tuesday. It said a probable cause hearing will be held within 17 days of the order's filing, with a final hearing to be held no later than the 61st day after the temporary suspension was ordered.
Eastland's suspension marks one of the state's first actions against a member of the family that owns and operates the camp since the deadly flood. It follows a series of emotional court and legislative hearings that focused on the Eastland family's lack of preparedness for the flood.
At one of those hearings, Eastland admitted that she still had not officially reported the 27 deaths to state health regulators, even though Texas law requires camp medical officers to do so within 24 hours. 'I did not think of this requirement in the moments happening after the flood,' she said at the April hearing. Eastland was also pressed as to why, as the camp's chief medical officer, she did not try to call or alert other medical staff to get to the campers before disaster struck. When she was then asked if the other staff could have helped with the camp evacuation, she said, 'Maybe so.'
Her husband, Edward Eastland, the director of the camp, also admitted at a hearing in April that there was no detailed written flood evacuation plan. He also acknowledged at the time that more campers likely would have survived if he and his father, camp co-owner Richard Eastland, as well as the camp safety director, made quicker decisions to evacuate, the Texas Tribune reports. Instead, Edward said he slept through a CodeRED text alert sent out on July 3 warning about the dangerous flash floods that were expected to last several hours. He finally woke up when his father called him on his walkie-talkie shortly before 2am to tell him rain was falling hard and they needed to move the canoes and water equipment off the waterfront. Yet they still opted not to evacuate the cabins at that point. 'It was not reasonable to do that at the time,' Edward said. 'The water wasn't out of the Guadalupe River. It was pouring down rain and lightning, and the cabins were safe at the time.' But soon, the surging water raised the river from 14 feet to 29.5 feet in just an hour.
Amid the hearings and lawsuits from family members of the deceased campers, the Texas Department of State Health Services told the Eastland family in April that its emergency plan - submitted under an application for a license renewal - was insufficient under new rules for a youth camp. In the aftermath, Camp Mystic announced that it had canceled its bid for an operating license to reopen portions of the camp for Summer 2026. 'No administrative process or summer season should move forward while families continue to grieve, while investigations continue and while so many Texans still carry the pain of last July's tragedy,' the camp said in a statement to the Texas Tribune.
CiCi and Will Steward, whose daughter Cecilia 'Cile' Steward's body still has not been located, then said they are 'grateful that no child will be placed in the Eastlands' care this summer.' But, they said, they did not feel that the camp's decision amounted to accountability. 'It was not out of respect for our grieving families, nor because they wanted to do the next right thing,' they said, noting: 'We have pled with them to stop since September.' In the end, they called the camp's decision to withdraw its bid 'a calculated exit from a license they were about to lose.'
