By Rachel Clarke

(CNN) — In the two deadliest child tragedies in the US this decade, Texas has turned to the same two investigators to determine what went wrong.

Casey Garrett and Michael Massengale did not know each other when the state asked them to untangle the mistakes and confusion surrounding the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school massacre. In 2022, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers and remained with his victims — alive and dead — for over an hour.

“It was a painful investigation, a deeply painful event,” Garrett told CNN in a joint interview.

The state legislature wanted answers quickly, so the two spent weeks poring over video evidence and police calls and interviewing people to produce their assessment of what happened. Their conclusion: “an overall lackadaisical approach” failed to stop the killing.

They thought they were finished. But they were not.

“God forbid,” Garrett said. “You’re not going to predict another casualty that has your skill set in mind.”

But in Camp Mystic, a year ago July 4, children again ended up trapped. This time floodwaters swamped cabins, with no one telling them they could and should leave their cabins. Two teenage counselors, 25 preteen campers and the camp patriarch died in the flash floods that hit the Texas Hill Country, about 60 miles north of Uvalde.

Massengale said the early public response troubled him almost immediately.

“I was hearing echoes of Uvalde, in the way that public officials were descending on the area and making public statements,” he said.

Texas legislators held special sessions to hear from those impacted by the broader disaster that killed more than 130 people. Still, questions lingered about Camp Mystic and how it was run — many driven by the parents of the lost girls who became known as “Heaven’s 27.” Their deaths forced another reckoning.

“It’s just a tragedy, the circumstances that brought us together twice,” Massengale told CNN.

While Garrett had not foreseen an investigation in the first hours after the floods, she agreed one was needed.

“There’s just no question that when you lose 27 children — it has to be looked at through a microscope as an entity that is being licensed and regulated by the state,” she said.

Their Uvalde report had given lawmakers a blunt, detailed account of institutional failure. After Camp Mystic, Texas asked them to do the same again.

The ‘yin and yang’ investigators

First impressions suggest Garrett and Massengale are an unlikely team. Garrett is gregarious; Massengale is more studious.

Both studied law in Texas. Garrett headed into criminal law, first as a prosecutor, then a defense lawyer. Massengale clerked for an appellate court judge and worked at an international law firm before being appointed as an appeals judge and then focusing on arbitration. The two never met, as best as they remember, until they were tasked by Texas lawmakers with getting answers for everyone in Uvalde and beyond about what had happened in May 2022.

“We hit the ground and, man, we had a mandate that they wanted a report quickly,” Garrett said. “It was fast, and it was intense, but it was effective.”

The pair soon made a strength of their differences, Massengale said. “While Casey was in Uvalde, really pounding the pavement and interviewing people and surfacing information for us, I spent a lot of my time cloistered in front of my computer with a hard drive of just gigabytes of data: the radio traffic, the video footage, the body cameras … We were trying to document it and tell a story to help people understand what had happened.”

During a hearing on Camp Mystic where she took the lead and spoke for hours — Garrett’s voice sometimes strained by emotion, her eyes welling with tears at what they had found — Garrett described their working relationship.

“One of the things that has made Michael and I so effective together … is that we have been a real yin and yang in Uvalde and here.”

It’s not a description that Massengale enjoys, but he acknowledges the underlying truth that they have markedly different approaches, honed by their different careers. Garrett said she goes into an investigation with no agenda, just curiosity and compassion, and becomes what Massengale calls a “natural advocate” for the people she interviews. Of himself, he said: “It’s really important for me professionally to present as a neutral person and actually be a neutral person.” He holds any judgment until all sides are considered, especially if they are contrary, he said.

That approach also allows free rein for Garrett. “I’ve never had to fight for the floor with Michael. He lets me talk and he listens,” she said. “Where I run hot, he is measured. Where I am maybe a little more emotional about certain things, he’ll push back on me, but, but I push back on him, right? I pull things out of him that are necessary.”

An example was how to use the word “obedience” as it referred to the culture at Camp Mystic, where campers and their teenage counselors stayed in their cabins — as they had been told to do — even as the waters rose and submerged what could have been easy escape routes. “Obedience” was a word Garrett heard often, especially for how adults and children were expected to relate to the camp’s patriarch, Dick Eastland, who perished as he belatedly tried to get children to safety. She mentioned it four times in her presentation to the Texas State Legislature, which commissioned the investigation, and members of the committee also commented on that culture. But the word can also be pejorative.

“There is no doubt that that is a perspective that many of the witnesses we’ve talked to do have, and that’s how they describe it, and so I do not mean to suggest that that was in any way wrong,” Massengale said. “But it is something that, as I sat down to write, it was important to me that things be grounded in objectivity and fact, and I found myself questioning, you know, one person’s obedience might be another person’s rule following.”

“Obedience” appears just once, in quote marks, in the report on Camp Mystic presented recently.

What they saw in both tragedies

The investigators noticed common themes between what happened in Uvalde and at Camp Mystic, despite the outward differences.

“It’s a hazard that is known, has been studied, people train to prepare for them: active shooter, flood,” Massengale said. “There’s even processes in place to alert people to heightened risks of these things happening.”

But in both cases, there was alert fatigue, he added: from the law enforcement action in Uvalde and its position near the Mexico border, and from the weather alerts affecting the Hill Country.

Garrett said, “The lack of preparation flows a little bit from ‘That won’t happen here.’” Despite the American epidemic of school shootings and a history of flooding in Kerr County, there was complacency, she said, that it just would not impact those specific communities.

Garrett and Massengale said that was an understandable part of human nature, but even if individuals or families choose not to heed warnings, it had to be different for people who are responsible for someone else’s children. “The Eastlands were responsible for almost 700 little girls, so they didn’t have the luxury of taking the risk that it wouldn’t happen here,” Massengale said, referring to the family who ran the camp.

Both Robb Elementary and Camp Mystic also suffered from messages not getting to the right people amid an emergency. In Uvalde, poor Wi-Fi delayed the lockdown alert reaching teachers, and police radios did not work inside the school, compounding a lack of communication among the law enforcement officers who responded, even about 911 calls begging for help from girls trapped with the shooter. In Camp Mystic, counselors in the cellphone-free cabins did not have walkie-talkies, and the public address system was not used to issue instructions.

Texas passed school-safety laws in the wake of the Uvalde report, in part emphasizing communication and coordination among responders, but attempts to restrict ownership of assault weapons failed. The state introduced camp-safety laws just weeks after the July 4 disaster, and lawmakers said they would determine whether more needs to be done based on Garrett and Massengale’s report. Camp Mystic had hoped to reopen this summer but withdrew its application in late April. It filed for bankruptcy reorganization in June. In Uvalde, there were further investigations and revelations and the town awaits a criminal trial of the former school district police chief.

The issues go far beyond a school and a camp in Texas, according to Garrett.

“So, if you’ve got hospitals out there with communication problems, they need to fix it. If there’s a school out there with communication problems, they need to fix it,” she said. “I know it costs money, but in this day and age, an inability to get sufficient communication to the right people is inexcusable.”

She said she would grieve this July 4 for the victims and the missed opportunities.

“It literally takes the breath out of your lungs to think about how truly avoidable this was.”

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