In April the hearing resumed with three searing days of testimony. The Eastlands’ supporters had seemingly been advised against wearing green. Edward Eastland wept from the witness box, saying he just wished there had been no camp last summer. His wife and codirector, Mary Liz Eastland, who is also a registered nurse and leads the camp medical operations, admitted she’d fled with her children and mother-in-law, Tweety, to higher ground early that awful morning. She looked almost in a dissociative state during questioning from the Stewards’ attorney: “[Cile] needed your help and you abandoned her, didn’t you?” the lawyer demanded. Blinking, her face pale and empty, Mary Liz murmured softly, “Yes.”
In a text afterward, Childress tries to describe how it felt hearing the Eastlands detail the chain of events over the last few hours of his daughter’s life: “The phrase that I have been using is that ‘I have been vibrating’ all week—with all emotions. (anger, sadness, grief, denial, frustration, everything.) Hearing the truth that we have been marinating in for nine months, to come so honestly (bizarrely and almost innocently) from their mouths is what took me aback the most…My brain has fully brought me back to thinking in detail about the violence of the deaths of the children and what they endured.”
After the hearing, numerous friends and family asked Childress if any part of him felt sorry for the Eastland family, for the weight of what they will forever shoulder. “It takes me in a circle,” he writes to me. “Of course pity, because they are dealing with the horrific disaster of their own making. But then you look at how they have handled themselves since July 4th. They should have engaged the families, taken responsibility, apologized. Even asked how we can make this right somehow so that camp could possibly continue to be a place of joy for others in the future. But that never happened. Two months after [the flood] they declared they were going to open again. So the pity that is there takes me right back to where I started, and the pity fades.”
A week after the Eastlands appeared in court, Texas state legislators drove over to conduct a site visit at Camp Mystic. Some Kerr County residents, frustrated with the pace of the state investigation and offended by the lack of urgency and respect for the victims beyond Camp Mystic, staged a demonstration on the highway corridor between Ingram and Hunt. In the rain, fed-up locals held up homemade signs bearing the number 119—a reminder to the government officials passing through of just how many lives were lost during the flood. One hundred nineteen—one person for every 454 residents of Kerr County, gone overnight.