Days after floodwaters swept through Camp Mystic and other parts of Central Texas, rescuers recovered the body of camper, Virginia Hollis.

The mother of an 8-year-old girl who died during catastrophic flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas received something "very special" after her death. In one of two letters written to her mother, Blakely McCroy said she was having an "amazing" time at Camp Mystic,

Blakely McCrory, an 8-year-old from Bellaire, wrote her mom a letter from Camp Mystic before she died in the July 4 flood.

Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain.

When a reporter asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott who is to blame for the deaths of more than 100 people in this month’s catastrophic Guadalupe River flooding, Abbott scoffed. Wh

For decades, Dick and Tweety Eastland presided over Camp Mystic with a kind of magisterial benevolence that alumni well past childhood still describe with awe.

Camp Mystic camper Blakely McCrory, 8, died in the Texas floods on the Fourth of July shortly after her dad and uncle died. Her mom, Lindsey McLeod McCrory, tells PEOPLE about Blakely's 'contagious spirit' and one of the final letters she received from her.

For grieving communities, the kinds of public memorials familiar from history — stone cenotaphs, bronze monuments and statues — feel inadequate to the demands of the present. Implacable and stolid, they can seem more about their own physical grandeur than the lives they honor.