A devastating Texas flood reopened old wounds. The community’s kindness, and resilience, is helping them heal again

(CNN) — Months after moving to Kerrville, Texas, John Melendrez stood in a neighborhood deli with a sandwich he just realized he couldn’t pay for. His only credit card was declined, and as he apologized to the owner, Chong Chin, embarrassment washed over him.

The two men had never met. But as Melendrez turned to leave empty-handed, Chin looked up from behind the counter, smiled, and waved him back. “Don’t worry about it,” Melendrez remembers Chin saying. “We need you to eat.”

It was a small act of grace, but one that lingered long after the meal.

Six years later, their roles have reversed.

After sweeping floodwater swallowed Greengrocers – Chin’s gourmet grocery story – Melendrez is now helping his neighbor, cutting drywall and gathering volunteers to haul trash bags stuffed with mud-caked debris, ruined furniture and waterlogged memories.

For the second year in a row, this quiet Hill Country town is digging itself out of a catastrophe that has mercilessly taken a community trying to heal and set them back on the path of mourning.

About a year’s worth of rain fell in parts of southern Texas last week and authorities said “a large and deadly flood wave” moved down the Guadalupe River, before it crested at nearly 38 feet in Center Point Thursday morning. A river gauge downstream from there in Comfort rose 25 feet in a single hour.

A year ago, historic flooding in Hill Country killed more than 130 people, including 25 young girls attending summer camp and two camp counselors. Their deaths shattered families across Texas and far beyond.

This year, two people were killed. The heartbreak was just as devastating.

Jennie Steward was away visiting family when the flood struck. For a few agonizing hours, first responders desperately searched for her husband, John Mark Steward. Their home had been ripped from its foundation and swept into floodwaters with him still inside.

“Wherever you are, my love, I am going to search high and low for you,” she wrote on Facebook, pleading for anyone who might have seen her husband, known affectionately as Mark to nearly everyone in Kerrville. “My best friend, my confidant. I love you like crazy.”

But hours later, she confirmed he had been found dead. Their third wedding anniversary was just one day earlier.

“Mark was such a loving soul to everyone around him. He made you feel seen and loved, no matter who you were,” Steward told CNN. “He completed me and I completed him.”

Mark, a stepfather to her children, had recently embraced a new title: grandfather.

“Our Ellie had his heart wrapped around her finger, literally and figuratively,” she told CNN. “She was his whole world. We got to spend Father’s Day together this year and it was the most beautiful day.”

Now Steward is grieving not only the loss of her husband, but also the loss of the home they built together. Friends, neighbors and her church have rallied around her, raising money and helping her navigate the unimaginable. Their support, she says, is the one steady thing left to hold onto.

“Our garden, our memories, everything material is gone but we have our friends, our church and our community,” she said. “I could not be in a better place for this to have happened.”

Taking care of their own

Across Hill Country, the floodwaters carved different paths of destruction.

In Uvalde — where the scars of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting remain impossible to ignore — one person was killed and dozens of homes were destroyed, compounding years of the community’s collective grief.

Elsewhere, the water destroyed houses that had only recently been rebuilt after last year’s disaster. Homes that had survived 2025 were swept away this time. Businesses that had never flooded before were suddenly underwater.

“In the beginning, it was just devastating,” Chin, the Greengrocers owner, told CNN, standing inside his wrecked store as neighbors shoveled mud and hauled debris beside him. “Right now, I’m kind of relieved because I got so many members of the community coming to help us.”

His friends say accepting help did not come easily.

When Melendrez found Chin after the flood, he was alone, kneeling on soaked carpet and cutting it into strips. Chin looked up and saw him, he smiled — the same quiet smile that greeted a stranger who couldn’t afford lunch — and opened the door.

Without flood insurance, Chin had already convinced himself he could somehow clean everything up and reopen within days. He worried others needed the help more than he did and prepared to shoulder the burden alone.

But in true Texas fashion, his community had other plans. Melendrez spread the word. He launched a GoFundMe for Chin and his wife, Kim, and called friends. Within hours, over 30 people showed up to help, armed with gloves, shovels and wheelbarrows.

Stories about Chin traveled through Kerrville as quickly as the floodwaters. Neighbors described a man who is always smiling and never hesitates to help – even now, when he’s lost everything.

“He’s handing out casseroles and cookies to the kids that are coming in, and he’s still just trying to serve the community, even though his business has been devastated,” Brandie Melendrez, John Melendrez’ wife, told CNN.

When praised, Chin smiles shyly, shaking his head. He’s just trying to be a good person, he says. He and his wife are still staying in their home on the property, which suffered even worse damage than the store. Friends discovered they had spent days sleeping on mud-caked mattresses.

Neighbors worry about the mold creeping through his home and the risks of staying there. Chin, who immigrated from Malaysia to the US in 1981 and has been in Texas for over three decades, is overwhelmed.

“I’m really not sure about anything,” he admits, flustered. “I’m really depending on all the people around me to help to guide me through all these things because this is my first devastation.”

His friends are helping him through the paperwork, the cleanup, the bureaucracy, and perhaps hardest of all, learning to accept the same generosity he has spent years giving away.

“No words,” he says, clutching at his heart, “can describe the feeling that I have with all the help that I am being given.”

Trauma layered upon trauma

Christie Burgess is still in shock.

A week after losing her home in Hunt, Texas, and nearly losing her life, she says the experience remains a blur, her memories returning only in scattered fragments.

Driving home from work, Burgess was caught by the floodwaters. Her vehicle was swept away, and for nearly 10 terrifying hours, through darkness and pounding rain, she fought to survive and find her way home.

“Until the sun came up, I just moved from spot to spot, trying to get out of the way,” she told CNN. “It’s pitch black outside, and it is raining so hard. The water’s up to the doors at one point. The road was washing out from underneath me, it just comes back to me in snippets. I really don’t remember how I got out of that situation. ”

When daylight finally came, she reached what was left of her house.

“I get to my home and it’s almost on its side and everything is just everywhere,” she said.

After last year’s catastrophic flood destroyed her sister’s home, Burgess returned to Hunt to help her rebuild from the ground up.

“It’s such a flip of the coin,” Burgess said. “Last year I was the one that was like, ‘hey, everything’s gonna be okay, we’re gonna get rid of the debris, we’re going to tear your house apart, rebuild it.’”

“Now it’s the exact opposite,” she said.

Like so many flood survivors, Burgess has been carried by the people around her. Her sister started a fundraiser. The bar where she works has rallied behind her. Across the Hill Country, that same instinct has become its own kind of lifeline.

Every day, Cord Shiflet drives 200 miles round trip from Austin, helping survivors tell their stories, connecting them with resources and raising more than $50,000 for affected families through Facebook. He sits with people for hours, listening as they try to make sense of lives upended overnight and trying to restore their hope.

“Growing up, if we learned of someone needing help, my dad was always the first to open his checkbook and my mom was the first to roll up her sleeves,” Shiflet told CNN. “No one ever told us we had to help people but as 7th generation Texans I think it’s simply in our DNA.”

“If I can use my voice to bring people together and remind someone they’re not facing their hardest day alone, then that’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Others, like Shim’s Be Blessed Catering & Food Trailer, have shown up with food, giving away over 1,000 sandwiches to flood survivors.

For many volunteer rescue workers, including Ryan Logue, a United Cajun Navy volunteer, the work has been ongoing for over a year, and despite the exhaustion and emotional trauma, they don’t want to slow their efforts down.

He has no doubt that his hometown will be able to rebuild again, but healing will be different. The floods drew attention to still unhealed wounds — and lingering regrets.

When Logue cleans the river, he still thinks about Cecilia “Cile” Steward, a young girl who was swept away in last year’s flood. Steward’s body hasn’t been recovered yet.

A year later, he still looks for her in the river.

“It’s a weird guilt that I live with,” he says, choking up. “I feel like I just didn’t do enough for that family.”

‘Sticks and stones’

In the bright, deceptively quiet days after the floodwaters receded, 77-year-old L.A. Cude sits outside with his dog, Shadow, and finds peaceful acceptance in his reality. Around him, everything he spent the past year rebuilding has been destroyed again.

For the second straight year, his home in Center Point has been claimed by the Guadalupe River. Yet somehow, even amid another disaster, he is still the one making everyone else laugh.

“Can you guess what L.A. stands for?” he says, giggling. “It stands for ‘lazy ass.’”

Life has rarely returned his kindness with the same generosity. A year after losing his wife — the love of his life for nearly six decades — the historic flood of 2025 took his home, too. While rebuilding, he lived in an RV donated by a stranger, piecing his life back together with help from Habitat for Humanity and FEMA.

Three weeks ago, that journey finally seemed over. His rebuilt house was finished. Then the rains returned, and the home was destroyed again, worse than before. Even the RV that once sheltered him is flooded.

For many people, it would be the kind of loss that crushes whatever hope remained.

Not Cude.

“Nothing else matters except me and my companion dog,” he told CNN, while Shadow sat faithfully behind him. “Me and the dog are fine. Sticks and stones break your bones, but the high water in the head is the only thing you really got to fight with,” he adds, alluding to the mental health struggles that comes with losing everything.

He knows that battle is only beginning for many people in Kerr County. The second flood has left behind more than wrecked homes, reopening trauma wounds for many survivors.

Cude doesn’t pretend otherwise. He jokes through the conversation, laughing and teasing often, even as he confesses he is working hard to keep the tears from breaking through.

Speaking about his wife is the only time he allows himself to cry.

“Linda,” he begins, before stopping to say it’s getting harder in the conversation to resist tears. “I was glad that she was not here to see the devastation, because I know that it would have broken her heart.”

His wife was an intelligent woman, and they couldn’t have been more different. Somehow, those differences became the foundation of a marriage that lasted 60 years. The secret, he says, was never going to bed angry, never trying to change each other and trusting each other to make the right decision during tough times. “We were so opposite it shouldn’t have stuck, but it did.”

He never imagined she would die before him. Years ago, he built a coffin for himself, expecting that one day he would be the first to go. Instead, he buried Linda in it.

Now, inside the flooded shell of his empty home, sits another coffin, the one he later built for himself.

Last year, nearly 20 inches of floodwater swallowed his home. This year, it was 30.

“I sat on the road outside of the house and watched the water, and after the water reached its peak, I sat there,” Cude said.

“For about five minutes I felt sorry for myself, and I looked at the dog that was behind me in the car, which is normal for her being my Shadow, and just said ‘it’s sticks and stones, and nothing else matters,’” he said.

But Cude is only getting older, and he has other things in life to worry about besides figuring out how to rebuild his home again.

“I’m not looking forward to, and it’s the wrong word, wasting another year. That may sound terrible,” he admitted.

Then, almost as if reminding himself how to keep moving, he adds: “I’ll put my boots on in the morning, pull them up by the bootstraps, and I’ll get through the day.”

Born and raised in Houston, Cude spent four decades in Tennessee working as a roofing contractor. Every year, through his church, he donated some of his earnings and his time to people whose lives had fallen apart, helping rebuild homes without expecting anything in return.

“I’ve been on that end of the stick and didn’t understand what ‘thank you’ meant until last year,” he said. “People would walk up to me and say thank you, and I would accept it, but I didn’t really understand what they were going through to say ‘thank you.’”

“I understand it now.”

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