“Our girls are still dead”: Camp Mystic parents pushed for laws to protect kids at camp. But their pain remains.

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Matthew Childress arrived at Matt’s El Rancho, an Austin restaurant, on Sept. 4 with mixed feelings of anticipation and grief. He greeted the other parents with hugs.

This group had largely been strangers two months earlier, before they learned that their children at Camp Mystic were missing after a massive flash flood, before many waited all night for answers about whether search crews had found any kids alive, before parents had to do the unimaginable and identify their child’s body.

Now, in their torturous sadness, they shared a bond. Over the past several weeks, these parents had pushed their ideas for summer camp reforms through the state Legislature with remarkable speed.

The moms and dads were gathering in Austin from Beaumont, Dallas, Bellville and other Texas cities. One family came from Alabama. The next day, they expected the Texas governor to sign the bills that they championed.

The changes would require kids’ camps to move overnight cabins out of floodplains, to follow weather warnings with radios and install alert systems, and to train staff on emergency plans including where to move children to higher ground if needed.

The parents believe any one of these steps would have kept their own children alive during the July 4 flood, which claimed 138 lives along the Guadalupe River, including 25 Camp Mystic campers, two counselors and the camp’s director. One camper remains missing.

Childress, a consulting executive, had driven from Houston to Austin with his wife, Wendie, an attorney. He was one of a pair of dads who helped organize the group for political action. He wanted to see something positive come from the tragedy.

Chloe Childress was one of the two counselors who died. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick hailed her and counselor Katherine Ferruzzo as heroes for trying to save the 8- and 9-year-old girls in their cabin instead of saving themselves.

Matthew Childress, 50, had always seen his daughter as his hero — a smart, funny girl who put her whole being into pursuing what she wanted, like when she launched her own online slime-selling business in elementary school. She was her parents’ energetic child, always running around and always sweaty. She was their music-loving Taylor Swift fan who wrote her own songs.

She grew up surrounded by adoring friends as they moved toward adulthood. She ordered Amazon decorations for their parties. She rapped Nicki Minaj lines. She made her friends wear “Can’t wait to gamble today” t-shirts at a Bahamas casino.

Now, as he ate fajitas and chatted with the other parents in the restaurant, Matthew Childress felt like he was nearing the end of a sprint of activity. The overflowing funeral for Chloe. Getting involved in the camp legislation and coordinating with the other parents and lobbyists to meet with officials and testify in support of the new laws at the Capitol.

Keeping so busy had helped Childress avoid the dark places in his mind. He didn’t know what he would do when the camp reform bills finally became law and he had to face his grief head-on.

“If I can solve this problem, it’s almost like I can bring her back,” he said. “If I can solve it, I’ll save her.”

To Wendie Childress, every day had felt like her worst nightmare, something to survive hour-by-hour. Her daughter had been her best friend, and Chloe’s absence felt like an insurmountable void. Chloe had been moving into a new phase of life, graduating from high school, taking a trip to Europe, getting ready for college.

“And then,” her mom said, “it was just like, fade to black.”

When he’d gone to identify Chloe’s body, Matthew Childress hoped that she had died quickly. When he saw her in a makeshift morgue on July 5, he saw wounds on her face.

He found he couldn’t leave her without doing what he had done compulsively since she was a baby. He kissed her 17 times. It was an arbitrary number, a code between them.

Goodnight. I love you.

* * *

Matthew and Wendie Childress had planned to celebrate July 4 by sharing a meal and drinks with friends at their home in Houston, then going to see fireworks at a country club. Their 15-year-old son was away at a friend’s family ranch. Chloe was at Camp Mystic, where she’d spent every July for 10 years.

The all-female camp represented tradition for women in the Childress family. Matthew Childress’ mother and sister had been campers there. When they dropped 8-year-old Chloe off at camp for the first time, one of his nieces, also a camper, was there to hold her hand.

Chloe made friends as she returned year after year. Five would speak at her funeral, dressed all in white, like they had for camp prayer services. They would tell stories about Chloe’s penchant for dropping into the splits, her stubborn conviction that she was right even when she was wrong and her dorky way of bringing up random facts.

They would talk about how she always laughed, even when she chipped her tooth at her own party to celebrate her high school graduation from the private Kinkaid School. They would remember how she would rush over in her Jeep to shop for makeup. They would recount how she kept riding Lime scooters and falling off of them.

Their friend lived fully.

This year was Chloe’s first summer as a Mystic counselor. She’d been accepted to her dream school, the University of Texas at Austin, the campus where her parents had met during their freshman years. She’d packed her turquoise trunk. She grabbed her lovey blankets with teddy bear heads she’d had her whole life. She'd covered a small bulletin board with photos using gold pushpins, then forgot to take it — so her mom had hurriedly brought it to her before she and other Houston-based counselors drove to camp.

Her mom had followed Chloe’s June 27 trip to Kerr County through the GPS locator on her phone until she arrived, safe.

On July 4, Wendie Childress started getting texts from other parents. The Guadalupe River had flooded early that morning. As they realized the severity of the storm, the Childresses threw together overnight bags and started the five-hour drive to Kerr County. Chloe might need a ride home, they figured.

They didn’t yet know the extent of the devastation along the Guadalupe: Ten inches of rain had fallen on the south fork of the river in three hours. The river’s main channel rose more than 20 feet, sweeping away trees, houses and vehicles. Camp Mystic was among the first places in the path of destruction.

The Kerr County judge who is supposed to be in charge of emergency response was out of town and asleep. The county emergency management coordinator was home sick and asleep. The county sheriff got involved only after dire calls for help began coming in. The local river authority had last year declined to move forward with pursuing state funding to build a flood warning system.

Before the Childresses reached San Antonio, a camp representative called to say they couldn’t find Chloe.

Matthew Childress reminded himself that his daughter was strong. She was a fighter. The machine, he called her.

“She was a force …. beyond belief,” he would later say. “Everything she faced, she figured out how to conquer.”

Surely, she was in a tree, waiting for rescue. Surely, a camp that operated next to a flood-prone river for 99 years had staff who knew how to deal with floods.

* * *

They arrived at Ingram Elementary School, the designated reunification center, joining other distressed Camp Mystic parents. Strangers brought snacks and drinks.

Someone started to call out the names of girls who were ready to go home. The first list was short, Childress recalled, and didn’t include Chloe’s name.

Childress gripped his sister-in-law’s arm. Tears fell. It hit him: “This is real,” he said. “I might not see my daughter again.”

Amid the wails and cries of parents, Blake Bonner, 39, waited to learn what happened to his 9-year-old daughter Lila.

Bonner, who lives in Dallas and works in finance, was in Austin with family for the July 4 weekend when he heard about the flood. Lila was at Camp Mystic for the first time, following in her mom’s footsteps. They wanted her to have the same experience of being outside, making friends and developing her faith.

Lila had never spent that long away from home before they dropped her off to a smiling, excited Chloe Childress and Katherine Ferruzzo, who were in charge of the cabin called Bubble Inn.

Now, Bonner kept cautiously showing people Lila’s photo, asking if anyone knew what happened to his empathetic, animal-loving older child who had dreamed of starting her own animal rescue one day.

“She was a perfect, just-turned-9-year-old girl that had a lot of life in front of her,” he said.

The parents heard so many rumors as they waited. They got reports that their kids were going to a hospital. That they were being rescued from trees. That they were stranded on an island in the river.

Bonner called it a pingpong of hope and defeat. He couldn’t help but get his hopes up as girls’ names continued to be read aloud.

Bonner’s wife, still in Austin, got the call about identifying Lila’s body. She called her husband, hysterical. “I knew immediately,” he said.

Later, it would occur to him that they were lucky in some terrible way because they didn’t have to keep waiting for someone to tell them she had died in the flood.

Childress kept his vigil for hours that afternoon and well into the night, not knowing what to do, awkwardly hugging people who left with their kids. He and other parents of the missing — parents he would come to know well — eventually moved to wait in a new location, Trinity Baptist Church in Kerrville.

Another Christian organization with dorm-like rooms took Childress and his wife in for the night. He lay down and stared at the ceiling, knowing that search teams with infrared cameras planned to keep scanning the river in the dark.

The next day, the waiting parents watched news conferences and had limited chances to ask officials questions. They chit-chatted nervously, Childress recalled, until someone would just break down.

“It was just absolute torture,” he said.

On the evening of July 5, the parents learned search crews that day hadn’t found anyone alive.

Childress dreaded his phone ringing because he knew it might mean bad news.

When he got the call from a Kerr County number, he fell to his knees.

* * *

Back in Houston, Childress spent 20 minutes in the car, unwilling to face his house without his firstborn child. Once inside, he made himself do what he dreaded most: He went into his daughter’s room. He curled up on her bed.

Chloe’s bulletin board showed a kaleidoscope of her life. Photos and memorabilia from camp made up one part of it. He vowed to leave her door open. Later, someone would find Chloe’s camp bulletin board and return it to the Childress family.

On her bedroom vanity was a post-it note on which was scrawled “Isaiah 43:2”. They would include the verse in her funeral pamphlet: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.”

Gov. Greg Abbott called legislators back to Austin on July 21 for a special legislative session following the 5-month regular session, and Childress knew they were holding hearings on the floods. But the process hadn’t gotten far, with Republicans trying to pass new congressional district maps to favor the GOP and Democratic lawmakers fleeing the state to stall that legislation.

A friend sent the name of a lobbyist to Childress, who saw an opportunity to take action.

Childress connected with Bonner, who’d been also stuck in a cycle of grief and shock.

Bonner couldn’t stop asking why Lila had died. He leaned into his faith; he wanted to see his daughter in heaven again. He concluded that her death didn’t come from some unavoidable act of God. It followed a series of very human errors. (Camp Mystic declined a request for an interview for this story.)

Bonner had been in touch with lobbyists too. A small, pro-bono lobbying team with people from various firms started to form.

“You can’t really legislate what God does,” Bonner figured. “But you can absolutely put in the safeguards to ensure that that [human] free will piece is appropriately balanced.”

Childress emailed the families of the 26 other girls who died — Heaven’s 27, they called them. With the lobbyists’ guidance, the families narrowed their goals. They aimed to present a positive, united front. They considered their recommendations to be in support of saving youth camps. After all, who would send their kids to a camp now if they didn’t know if their kids would be okay?

The lobbyists realized this was different than any work they had done, said Kelly Barnes, who works with HillCo Partners and who attended the same college as Bonner. This was a matter of life and death, and it could have been them in the parents’ shoes.

The group would have a limited window to strike, with no room for error, if the governor called a second 30-day special session. They had to focus.

“It grabbed us in a way we’d never felt before,” Barnes said.

On Aug. 14, a majority of the families met with “the big three”: Abbott, House Speaker Dustin Burrows and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The parents took turns talking about their daughters. Barnes said it was the most incredible, raw, emotional advocacy he had seen in his career. The politicians recognized the gravity of the moment, listened with compassion and vowed to act.

The governor told the parents he would be calling a second special session, and that this time he would make camp safety the top priority. Childress said when he heard that, he lost his composure.

“I wasn’t quite expecting that,” he said. That was the same day that he’d been planning to move Chloe into her college dorm.

Legislators introduced new bills — House Bill 1 and Senate Bill 1 — with a focus on camps. More meetings followed. When a Senate committee held a hearing on its bill on Aug. 20, the Camp Mystic parents again showed up to Austin to share their stories.

The Bonners talked about Lila’s gentleness, and how she’d been voted best manners at her camp dining table. Rescuers found Lila’s body 5.6 miles away from the camp, her mother told the lawmakers.

Childress, who spoke for his family while his wife stayed home with their son, who was starting his sophomore year of high school, told legislators he tried not to think about the fear that the girls felt as they scrambled for their lives, after waiting in their cabins as instructed.

His daughter was fun, spontaneous and a troublemaker, he told them. She was also smart, studious and driven.

“She did what I told her,” Childress testified. He wore his daughter’s Fitbit on his wrist. “She followed directions, the authorities, and that is what killed her.”

The rules had to change.

On Aug. 21, the House passed its bill while the parents watched. They wanted to see this all the way through. Bonner, among the team and the parents in the gallery upstairs, studied the lobbyists’ body language for any sign of how he should feel.

Later that night, the Senate passed its bill. The members couldn’t unhear the parent’s stories, Republican Sen. Lois Kolkhorst from Brenham said.

“In your grief, you have achieved remarkable advocacy,” said Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, an Austin Democrat.

The bills had just a few more steps to go.

* * *

On Sept. 5, Matthew and Wendie Childress filed onto rows of steps in front of the governor’s mansion, sweating in the heat. They stared ahead stoically as Abbott recounted how the parents pleaded for camp safety.

Childress nodded as Abbott ticked off what the bills would do. Installing alert systems. Training staff on evacuation routes. Requiring emergency plans. Requiring cabins to be out of floodplains.

“Every child who goes to camp should come home to their families,” Abbott said to the television cameras and assembled journalists.

Abbott wrote his name slowly, using dozens of Sharpies to sign small pieces of his name, so the parents could receive Sharpies used to sign the bills. He snapped the lids on and off. Camera shutters clicked. Hands gripped each other. Tears fell.

Wendie Childress stood behind her husband and held his shoulder as the lieutenant governor again praised Chloe and the other counselor, as he had done on the Senate floor. Matthew Childress reached across his chest to grab his wife’s hand.

Patrick suggested hanging a portrait of Chloe and Katherine, her fellow counselor, in the House and Senate chambers. Childress cocked his head, unsure how to process that information.

After 21 minutes, it was over. Childress exhaled.

He and Bonner had accomplished what they sought to do. They had honored their daughters. They had done what they felt was right and they had done their best.

But they still couldn’t change the horrible truth that their daughters weren’t coming back.

“It’s not some overwhelming joyous thing,” Bonner said, “because our girls are still dead.”

Chloe wouldn’t start her college classes. She wouldn’t go to medical school. She wouldn’t get married or have kids. Matthew Childress felt crushed by the weight of all the memories with his daughter that he would not get to have, and that “the world doesn’t get to be exposed to how amazing she was.”

They would have to keep moving without Chloe. They would have to find their ways to keep living and crying and remembering and advocating and loving.

“It has to be for something,” Childress said.

Disclosure: HillCo Partners, LLC and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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