Camp Mystic families are hurting enough. Stop the hate, hoaxes and rumors

The girls who attended Camp Mystic each summer couldn’t bring their smart phones or iPads, not even so much as a Polaroid camera. They didn’t spend their days filming TikTok videos or scrolling, with a foreboding sense of FOMO, through the air-brushed posts of some fabulous friend. 

Instead, they were training with archery bows on giant bull's-eyes freckled by fledgling attempts. They were perfecting dance routines and traversing wildflower fields on horseback. They were lifting their youthful sopranos in song about the camp of their dreams, full of “bright moon beams” where “hearts are loyal and true.”

I never got to attend a camp like this and never got to send my girls to one but from everything I’ve read and heard, it was a rare refuge in today’s world, a place that strove for such tranquility and simplicity that it might seem an impossible utopia if it hadn’t managed to exist for 100 years.

“It was the closest place I was with God,” one Houston middle-schooler told me Monday, adding that she had aspired to one day become a counselor shepherding the next generations of girls. Her mom, a former camper, said she signed up her daughter for the camp waitlist soon after she was born.

“It’s a magical place and it was a place of safety and peace and love and family and Jesus. I can’t even explain to you when you’d enter the gates, even if you’d never been a part of it, it was so wonderful,” she told me. “Now it’s a place of horror.”

She wasn’t just talking about the tragic flooding that has claimed at least 110 lives, including 30 children, she was admonishing the cruelty with which some have responded to the tragedy online. 

She thanks God that her own daughter escaped the rushing Guadalupe waters, in part by clinging to a rope and sloshing single file with her cabin mates through a flooded golf course, bumping into old scrapbooks and dead fish as they inched toward the safety of a helicopter. The girl, 14, told me she got out with little more than a few family photos, a water bottle dangling from two fingers and a worn Jellycat dog she’s had since she was a baby.

But her mother says she's struggling with the vile responses online, “watching people try and sensationalize this and rip the camp to shreds.” 

It seemed to start early on social media, the attempts to diminish the tragedy and distract from the loss of innocent young lives, away from the terror of parents awaiting news of lost daughters, away from the agony of moms and dads who just got word that the babies they’d nursed and driven to soccer practice and taught to ride their first bike would never come home.

In social posts and comments under news articles, some were quick to point out the location of the camp in a rural, conservative part of Texas and the complexions of the mostly white campers. They extrapolated that the suffering families must have voted for Donald Trump for president, and thus, must have supported his government funding cuts to the National Weather Service and disaster response agencies, and thus, must reject climate change, and thus, must be disqualified from compassion.

In Houston, Sade Perkins, who served on a food insecurity board, was quickly removed by Mayor John Whitmire after she attacked Camp Mystic parents on TikTok, branding them “MAGA Christians” who wouldn’t care if the victims had been Hispanic and would be “thrilled” if the children “floating down that river” had been LGBTQ.  

This hate — amplified by the Internet’s empowerment of anonymous rage and rampant rumor — is repugnant and obviously in sharp contrast to the generous Texans and fellow Americans who have donated money or supplies for relief efforts and rushed to help search for victims and clear debris. 

It’s exactly the kind of worldly toxicity that Camp Mystic was trying to keep at bay, if only for a few weeks each summer. The flood of ugliness rode the waves of trauma, though, deepening the pain of surviving girls and their families.

Some of it stems from our bitter division, a sad consequence of an American culture that now politicizes everything from classic literature to weather.

Some of it comes from confusion and negligent echoing of hearsay.

Unverified and untrue 

It’s still unclear who started a widely shared rumor over the weekend that raised false hopes of desperate parents that two girls had been found alive clinging to a tree around Comfort or Center Point.

I first saw the rumor spread on Facebook where a user mentioned it in passing during a live video post on debris-clearing efforts. I raced to a law enforcement command center in Kerrville to ask the public information officer about it. I could see in his exhausted eyes that he wanted it to be true but he told me he couldn't confirm the story. By the end of the conversation, we were both in tears. Later that night, in another video, the Facebook user apologized profusely, saying he’d only shared something told to him by a law enforcement officer whom he had no reason to doubt. 

Others are motivated by much darker forces, including profiting from lies and scams.

Shortly after interviewing the Houston middle-school camper and her mom, they sent a fearful text asking me not to use their names. Mom said she’d just seen fake posts using girls’ names and hoaxes exploiting their identities. She sent me an obit about a girl who was still alive and a TikTok post suggesting another girl did something “creepy” to aid her own survival.

I scrapped the mother-daughter feature I had planned and lamented that another true story was silenced by fear caused by all the fake ones. 

Meanwhile, officials in Kerr County told reporters on Monday that scammers were trying to extort parents who had publicized their cell phone numbers in hopes of aiding the identification of their daughters. 

“We’re dealing with scammers,” said Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice. “Victims’ families are being reached out to, saying that they have their kids, ‘pay me money.’ It’s heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking.”

Such evil is hard to fathom but not unprecedented. It’s similar to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ campaign against Sandy Hook families, accusing grieving parents of fabricating the deaths of 20 first-graders who were gunned down in a mass shooting in 2012. 

The motivation? Money, apparently. His baseless claims earned hundreds of millions in sales, says Bill Ogden, a Houston attorney who represented five of the families who sued for defamation and won a settlement of more than $1 billion.

“They can hide behind ‘I was just asking questions’ but if you ask the questions and you never, ever go look for the answers, you’re just monetizing a tragedy at somebody else’s expense,” Ogden told me Tuesday. 

It’s an important reminder, even for good-intentioned people who sometimes forget the line between healthy skepticism and perpetuating conspiracies. 

Ogden says exploiting tragedies is probably a fact of life in this Internet age but he says good people don’t have join in. Most adults are capable of basic fact-checking and cursory searches for reputable news and government sources before sharing questionable claims. 

Ogden says he knows a couple of families who lost children in the Hill Country flooding: “The last few days have been horrible because people have been sending them random posts saying ‘this says they found her,’” he said. “It makes it harder.”

The Camp Mystic families have suffered enough, and their pain is far from over. Even some who escaped, like the Houston mother and daughter I interviewed, are struggling with survivors’ guilt. 

Those of us who truly want to help them shouldn’t contribute, even passively, to the toxicity around this tragedy online. Yes, there are hard questions that need to be asked and deserve to be answered that can lead to policy changes that save lives. That constructive dialogue is the opposite of abetting unfounded rumors and hoaxes.

We adults can’t take refuge in a Camp Mystic utopia, even if we wanted to. There’s little innocence or even earnestness left in our national discourse. But if we try really hard, most of us can conjure up enough grace, even in this cruel world, to treat a grieving neighbor with compassion.

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What’s on your mind? What are y`ou curious or concerned about? Let me know by responding directly to this email or writing me at Lisa.Falkenberg@HoustonChronicle.com.

        

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