When the water began to rise July 4 in Hunt, a community in western Kerr County at the heart of the Texas Hill Country, RJ and Annie Harber tried to act fast.
They and their two daughters — 13-year-old Blair and 11-year-old Brooke — had driven to their vacation home in Casa Bonita for the Fourth of July weekend when the flooding began in the early hours of Friday morning. Blair and Brooke were sleeping in a separate lodge five houses down with their grandparents, Charlene and Mike Harber.
Wearing only their pajamas and in complete darkness as water began to leak into the cabin, Annie and RJ frantically broke a window to escape while the water rose at least one foot every minute.
RJ went to the neighboring house to borrow a kayak to get to his children — waking his neighbors and saving their lives in the process — but by then, the water had grown more relentless. Had he left, RJ knew he would be overpowered by the current. It was too late.
The Guadalupe River rose at breakneck speed — up to 26 feet in just 45 minutes.
RJ, Annie and the neighbors sought refuge in one of the few homes that was still standing and waited to be rescued. Brooke sent one final message to her family, at 3:30 a.m. “I love you,” the text read.
By daylight, the cabin holding Charlene, Mike, Blair and Brooke was gone. Now, RJ and Annie Harber, other family, friends and the North Dallas community are grieving the loss of the two sisters, whose lives left an immeasurable impact.
The sisters’ bodies were recovered July 5, about 15 miles downriver. Their hands were clasped together, and each girl had their rosary.
Charlene and Mike Harber remain unaccounted for a week later.
The sisters’ deaths have been felt across North Texas, but they have particularly struck a chord within its Catholic community.
On July 5, St. Rita Catholic Community held a prayer service for the sisters during which hundreds of people, including members of the clergy and classmates, mourned the loss.
“It’s an unimaginable tragedy,” Father Joshua Whitfield told The Dallas Morning News. Whitfield is pastoral administrator of St. Rita Catholic Community, which is both a parish and private school. He is a contributing columnist for The News and has known the Harbers for most of the girls’ lives.
“So when you can’t get your head around it to comprehend the tragedy, you get back to basics and the basics for us are love of God and love of neighbor,” he said. “Sometimes you gotta love God to love neighbors, sometimes you gotta love neighbor to love God and so what that means in practice is coming together, gathering together, taking care of each other. Simply checking in on one another.”
‘This is the heart of our St. Rita community’
RJ introduced his family to the parish when the girls were young children and, in the years since, has sown a community. Annie works at the school as a first and second grade instructional specialist and previously taught Whitfield’s own kids.
It was at St. Rita that Blair and Brooke deepened their faith, faith that they carried with them until their last breath.
The Harbers have been an integral part of the parish, and now the community is paying it forward in the wake of devastation that has left an entire Texas region grief-stricken.
Parishioners have begun preparing meal plans and scheduling babysitting rotations for those that have been impacted by the Hill Country flooding, while honoring the lives of the Harber sisters.
“We love,” Michael Wixted, president of St. Rita Catholic School, said at the July 5 service. “We show up like this evening. We pray like this evening. In the days ahead, we surround RJ and Annie with compassion, and we hold each other close. This is the heart of our St. Rita community.”
The school was scheduled to hold a joint funeral for the sisters on Monday.
The Harbers have declined to speak, but Whitfield spoke about the joy Blair and Brooke brought to the school.
“If you were to walk on campus at St. Rita on any given day, you’re gonna be surrounded by tons of families and tons of kids and each kid has his or her own story and so those two girls were two beautiful ladies in our community,” he said.
One would be hard pressed to find an activity the Harber sisters did not participate in or a soul they didn’t impact.
An older sister who did everything
Blair was enrolled in advanced classes and split her spare time between yearbook club, speech and drama club. She had hoped to audition for the lead role in the eighth grade play this fall, a reprisal of Bye Bye Birdie.
When the 13-year-old wasn’t doing these things or engrossed in her role as a student ambassador, she played sports. A lot of them.
Blair played volleyball, basketball and lacrosse and, if she wasn’t playing on the court, then she was on the sidelines supporting her classmates as part of the St. Rita cheerleading squad.
“When you hit seventh grade at St. Rita, you can start cheerleading, and so she was a big cheerleader, and I would have interactions with her mostly because she was a server. She’s one of our regular servers at Mass, and so one of my greatest memories ever will be getting dressed and ready to go to mass to serve,” Whitfield said.
A younger sister with spunk
According to those who knew her, Brooke was a typical younger sister, possessing a degree of spunk that seemed almost astonishing for somebody as young as 11 years old. But she was precocious, witty and fearless.
The young girl always had a quip in her back pocket and, like most children her age, reveled in anything that required constant movement. A rising sixth grader, Brooke was also active in sports — playing lacrosse, soccer, basketball and volleyball.
“Brooke was more sort of the feisty athlete, you know,” Whitfield said. “Played lacrosse and when you’re that age, your number one job is to have fun, right? And so that was their life.”
Blair and Brooke’s relationship was what one would expect from sisters so close in age.
“Blair being a few years ahead of Brooke, there’s all that guidance and rivalry, and Brooke looking up to Blair but not wanting Blair to know it and it’s all filled with love,” Whitfield said. “So it is an amazing sign that they were together, that they were together through it all and found together, which is something no one here will forget.”
However, most noteworthy about the two girls was their unwavering faith, demonstrated by their final moments. For Whitfield, it’s a testament to their devotion.
“When I was Blair’s age, faith wasn’t as real to me as it was to her,” Whitfield said. “The rosary was a big part of their game, a big part of their life, and it’s in moments like these that you are humbled and are awed by the faith of the people around you.”
As the St. Rita community continues to reel from the devastating floods, classmates and parishioners are honoring the sisters. Their classmates see the young girls in the purple, yellow and pink ribbons that now adorn the trees on the St. Rita campus in memory of them. Those were their favorite colors.
The girls’ aunt, Jennifer Harber, works as a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines and the company pledged to bring the Harber sisters home, and to help with any relief efforts in the region. Southwest shared this statement with The News:
“As a Texas-based and Texas-born Company, we are mourning alongside our neighbors in the Hill Country,” the Dallas-based airline said in its statement. “Our Hearts are heavy at the level of unthinkable devastation and our thoughts are with those navigating the aftermath. Supporting our Employees and their families is our initial focus, including assisting with transportation arrangements. In addition, we are actively involved with our community partners locally, who are aiding in the Central Texas relief effort, and we will continue our support for the communities and people we serve.”
Whitfield also imparted a message from the Harbers.
“A lot of people are suffering, and we need to have arms wide enough to care for everybody,” he said. “Annie and RJ lost their girls but you also have two boys in the community who lost their cousin Lila.”
Nine-year-old Lila Bonner was one of the girls who died at Camp Mystic during the flooding.
The Harbers want to ensure that the lives of Lila and every other victim are just as honored as Blair and Brooke, as Texans continue to come together in this time of need.
“I’m saying to take a special effort to make sure that people are seen, and I don’t mean that in a sort of recognition sense,” Whitfield said. “We don’t want people to hurt alone and that’s really, really important these days here at St. Rita. To quote RJ from last night, he said, ‘We want our girls to be remembered as people.’”
CORRECTION, 12 p.m., July 14, 2025: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect reference to Father Joshua Whitfield.