MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Saturday marks one year since flooding in central Texas killed more than 130 people, including 25 young campers and two counselors at Camp Mystic. Their families call them Heaven's 27. Houston Public Media's Dominic Anthony Walsh spoke with a father whose grief led him to advocate for others.
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DOMINIC ANTHONY WALSH, BYLINE: On July 12, 2025, friends and family gathered at a church in Houston to celebrate the life of Chloe Childress, one of the counselors at Camp Mystic.
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MATTHEW CHILDRESS: So yeah, this sucks. This sucks. This is as terrible as you think it is.
WALSH: In his eulogy, Chloe's father, Matthew Childress, paints a portrait of an ambitious young woman about to start school at the University of Texas. He describes Chloe as a hero who tried to help young girls at Camp Mystic as the floodwaters rose, and he said goodbye the way they had her entire life - with 17 kisses.
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CHILDRESS: Please honor Chloe. Please celebrate Chloe. Remember, she's not just my hero anymore, but all of yours, as well. Good night, my sweet pea, my hero. Seventeen kisses. Three squeezes.
WALSH: A year later, Matthew says he's still oscillating between the different stages of grief.
CHILDRESS: How I've dealt with this and many of the families have dealt with this is putting that grief and that pain and that anger into purpose.
WALSH: They lobbied for new camp safety laws in Texas, and they succeeded. Camps in floodplains must add evacuation equipment, like ladders to cabins, among other requirements, and they must now evacuate if the National Weather Service issues a flood warning alert. Two months after finding out his daughter died, Matthew stood with other families on the steps of the governor's mansion in Austin as Greg Abbott signed the bills into law.
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GREG ABBOTT: Improved and safer camp safety is now law in the great state of Texas, a law that will save lives.
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WALSH: Since then, the families lobbied for similar changes in Alabama. The new camp safety law there is named after Sarah Marsh, an 8-year-old girl from the state who died at Camp Mystic.
CHILDRESS: And it brings such joy and happiness that their lives are not just lost in vain, that they can be conceived or seen as heroes, helping to save other lives of children that they would never have met in the past.
WALSH: And the families pushed for a state investigation. Investigator Casey Garrett presented her findings about the family that owns the camp, the Eastlands, in April. There was no evacuation plan, and the Eastlands were slow to get girls out of the cabins.
CASEY GARRETT: They are loving, Christian people. Unfortunately, they were running a multimillion-dollar for-profit business like something from 1965. These people did not want this to happen, but nothing had changed in decades.
WALSH: Camp Mystic's legal team did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Childress says the hearings were tough to hear, but there was also a sense of vindication.
CHILDRESS: All that information was shocking on the face of it but also confirmed everything that we had been claiming. There was a tremendous amount of relief. You know, I felt like that there was a weight lifted from many of us.
WALSH: Camp Mystic filed for bankruptcy in late June, putting multiple lawsuits in limbo. Still, the families are not done. They're pushing for camp safety laws across the country. Childress says he sees momentum behind bills filed in Maryland, Missouri and Oklahoma. Twenty-seven lives were lost last year, but because their families turned their grief into action, the camps parents are sending their kids to in Texas this summer are safer than they were a year ago.
For NPR News, I'm Dominic Anthony Walsh in Houston.
(SOUNDBITE OF JATINDER SINGH DURHAILAY'S "YATRA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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