Board suspends Camp Mystic co-owner’s nursing license

By Bethany Blankley
The Center Square

The Texas Board of Nursing has suspended the nursing license of Mary Liz Eastland, a co-owner of Camp Mystic, the flooded all-girls camp in Hunt, Texas, where she was listed as the registered nurse, supervising nurse, camp nurse and chief health officer.

The decision came less than a month after a bipartisan Texas House and Senate Joint Investigating Committee held two days of hearings into circumstances surrounding the deaths of 25 campers and two counselors at the camp last July 4. Multiple parents have filed wrongful death lawsuits alleging gross negligence, among other claims. Three state investigations are ongoing, including a criminal investigation by the Texas Rangers.

The board voted to suspend Eastland’s license effective Tuesday, but the decision was not announced until Thursday. The board issued an Order of Temporary Suspension, citing six charges and said Eastland continuing to practice as a nurse constitutes “a continuing and imminent threat to public welfare.”

The first charge states that Eastland “failed to develop and maintain adequate emergency plans and emergency training protocols for campers staff and camp nurses” and “should have been aware of the camps previous catastrophic flooding events but still failed to develop and implement adequate emergency shelter and evacuation plans.” It also states, “Her lack of emergency preparedness for herself and her camp nurses was likely to injure campers and staff in that it created and or maintained an unsafe environment and likely resulted in physical harm, emotional harm, psychological harm and loss of life to campers and staff in an emergency or disaster at Camp Mystic.”

The second charge makes a similar claim also stating her conduct was “likely to injure campers … created an unsafe environment and may have unnecessarily [caused] … loss of life.”

The third states that she ”abandoned the campers and staff when the camp site began to flood at approximately 0200 by evacuating herself and her children to higher ground without providing any assistance or direction to all of the other campers and staff.”

She also didn’t contact nursing staff or provide an emergency instruction at any time and never contacted emergency services even after she became aware that campers were missing and unaccounted for, the charge states, consistent with testimony given at the hearings.

The fourth charge states she failed to report the deaths of 27 campers and counselors within 24 hours and her conduct was “deceptive.”

She still had not reported their deaths at the time of the hearing, prompting state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst to demand that she follow the law, adding that she wasn’t above the law, The Center Square reported.

The fifth and sixth charges state that drugs were inappropriately administered to campers under Eastland’s watch and that the camp wasn’t in compliance with federal health laws.

The order also sets a schedule for hearings to be conducted.

The camp’s owners have denied any wrongdoing and planned to reopen the camp at the end of May.

Two days after the hearings, they acquiesced to state lawmakers demanding that they not reopen, The Center Square reported.

At the hearing, Austin-based surgeon Dr. Julie Sprunt Marshall, whose daughter survived the flood, raised multiple medical concerns about Eastland’s conduct, The Center Square reported. She said the surviving campers “should have been medically evaluated by the camp’s health officer, Mary Liz Eastland,” but weren’t. “She made no effort to do this. We were never called that day by the Eastland family.”

Marshall also testified that she was asked to medically evaluate surviving campers “because the camp health officer was nowhere to be found,” referring to Eastland.

After the flood, Eastland “did not survey the camp for missing or injured children … did not know that dead children were on the grounds” and “failed her statutory obligation to report camper deaths” to the state, Marshall added.

In response to the Nursing Board’s decision, Camp Mystic’s attorney Joshua Fiveson said in an emailed statement, “This is a sad day for Mrs. Eastland as well as every licensed nurse in Texas. Mrs. Eastland has admirably committed herself to service of others for the last eighteen years. Yet the Texas Board of Nursing decided to summarily suspend her right to practice without the benefit of testimony, evidence or a complete investigation. Mrs. Eastland received notice of her summary proceeding less than twenty-four hours before it took place, and what followed had nothing to do with public protection. This was an exercise in premature punishment.

“But judgments should not precede process in an ordered system of justice. Mrs. Eastland rejects the Board’s allegations and looks forward to defending her rights before the State Office of Administrative Hearings,” Fiveson said.

Eastland testified under oath that as a registered nurse she was required to be on site and on call but wasn’t. She also testified that she wasn’t signed up for code red alerts, didn’t go to the camp’s infirmary, didn’t call the nurses to warn them, didn’t instruct them to check on the cabins, didn’t call 911 and admitted to “abandoning” the campers on July 4. Those were all points brought to state lawmakers by investigators.