07/12/2026
🩵💡🏀 www.brightlikelucy.org
In Houston, Texas, inside the front door of Brandt and Lisa Dillon's home, there is a wooden table.
On it sits a bracelet holder. Colorful rubber bracelets hang from it, each one carrying a name. Some have a foundation name. Some have a saying. Every single one honors one of the 27 campers and counselors who died at Camp Mystic on July 4, 2025, when the Guadalupe River swept through Kerr County in the dark and took everything it touched.
One of the bracelets says Lucy.
Lucy Dillon was 8 years old. She was a Twins I camper, one of the youngest girls at the camp that night. Half of her cabin did not survive. She was heading into third grade at Memorial Drive Elementary in Houston. She loved corgis. She loved reading. She was a devoted Houston Rockets fan who dreamed of playing college basketball one day and had already helped her softball and basketball teams win championships.
At 3 years old, she learned to ride a bike. By 4, she was playing basketball. She shot hoops in her driveway the way other kids watch TV.
On the morning of July 5, 2025, Lucy's parents learned she was gone.
Camp Mystic was housing 750 girls when the floodwaters arrived. Flash flood warnings had been issued. Investigators and lawmakers would later scrutinize why those warnings did not result in evacuations, why emergency training for counselors was insufficient, and why the response was delayed. The camp withdrew its license application for the 2026 season in April, acknowledging that no summer season should move forward while families continue to grieve and investigations continue.
Twenty-eight people died. More than 100 died across Texas Hill Country that weekend. It was one of the deadliest floods in American history.
Brandt and Lisa Dillon started the Bright Like Lucy Foundation within weeks of losing their daughter. They make merchandise themselves in some cases. Every dollar goes toward the things Lucy loved: STEAM projects, sports, and corgis. Her basketball jersey is now framed and hanging upstairs. On either side of it are patches — one reading LD7 in Lucy's favorite bright blue, one reading Heaven's 27, which her softball teammates wore on their uniforms the season after she died.
A year later, the Dillons welcomed reporters back into their home to talk about what the foundation has become and what the first year without Lucy has looked like.
Brandt chose his words carefully.
"When you lose a child, of course initially you're in shock."
He did not need to finish the sentence. Anyone listening already understood.
What the Dillons have built in the twelve months since the flood is not just a memorial. It is a decision. A decision that the girl who loved bright blue and basketball and corgis and books was going to leave something behind that helped other children, that carried her energy forward into the world, that made people who never met her feel like they knew her.
Bright Like Lucy. Because that is exactly what she was.
This Saturday marks one year since the floodwaters came through Kerr County and took 28 people from their families. Please stop today and say a prayer for Lucy Dillon and for every family that has spent this year learning to live with something unlivable.
Share this so Lucy's name keeps reaching people who need to know her story.
And if you want to support the Bright Like Lucy Foundation, search for it by name.
