“After 30 years of being together, all of a sudden you're on your own,” Brian Eads tells PEOPLE about his late wife Katheryn
Credit: Victoria Eads
NEED TO KNOW
- University of Texas at San Antonio professor Katheryn Eads was one of the victims of the July 4, 2025, Texas floods
- Her husband, Brian, who was with her when they got swept up and separated in the floodwaters, tells PEOPLE she was the anchor of their family
- In addition to Brian, Katheryn left behind two daughters and a grandson
Asked how he would describe his wife of 30 years Katheryn Eads, Brian Eads remembers her as a loving spouse, mother, daughter and sister who believed that family was everything.
“Her mother was her best friend,” Brian, 53, of Cibolo, Texas, tells PEOPLE. “She was close to her father. All of her siblings. She was determined, the go-getter. She had a Ph.D. in psychology that she worked on while she was also raising two daughters and being a military spouse. When she set her mind to something, that's what she was going to do.”
Katheryn, 52, a University of Texas at San Antonio professor, was one of the many victims who died in the 2025 Texas flooding tragedy. As the disaster’s one-year anniversary approaches, Brian says he is still trying to put the pieces back together and navigate his life without her.
“Kathy was our anchor,” he says. “She was the one who held the family together and she was involved in everybody's life. The hardest thing is just figuring it out whenever the person that you would turn to for advice or opinion or anything, that person's not there anymore.”
Brian — who served in the Navy for 20 years — first met Katheryn at a concert in Jacksonville, Fla. They later married and raised two children, Victoria and Rachel, now 28 and 21, respectively. The couple moved from Key West, Fla., to Texas six years ago to be closer with their respective families.
“It was just one of those that was meant to be,” Brian says of his relationship with Katheryn. “I never would've stayed in the Navy as long as I did if it wasn't for her. She pushed everybody to want to be better and to do more. And one of her biggest things was, 'If you want to do it, just do it.' "
As a mother, Katheryn would do anything for her two girls, Brian says. “She pushed them to always do good in school. She did everything. I'm sure everybody says this about their person, but I mean, she really was it.”
Katheryn worked in the foster care system before working in academia, and was especially passionate about her students. "She loved it when they would graduate and go on and have their careers,” Brian says, “and then they would reach out to her thanking her for all of her guidance and stuff. That really made her feel good.”
On July 4, 2025, Brian and Katheryn were camping in an RV for the Fourth of the July weekend in Kerr County. He woke up around 2:30 a.m. amid thunderstorms, looked outside and saw flash flooding, but the common occurrence didn't seem like a cause for alarm.
“We were kind of elevated, too,” he recalls of the RV. “It's not like we were river level. So I looked outside and I saw some puddling in the parking areas and stuff and I was like, 'Okay, no big deal.' "
Brian returned to bed shortly after, but then woke up again about an hour later and sensed something was wrong. When he opened the front door, the water was below the top step of the RV. That was when he told Katheryn, "‘Babe, we got to go. We got to go right now.’ "
Credit: Victoria Eads
During the evacuation, the couple headed for Brian’s truck, but Katheryn lost her footing and the water was rushing too fast. Meanwhile, a man at the campsite offered Brian and Katheryn to get in the bed of his truck and drove it across the lane.
“He got maybe 20-30 feet and then the water drowned his engine out,” Brian recalls. We were watching RV after RV got swept away, and then we got swept out into the river."
The couple were still able to communicate with each other for a few seconds before they got separated. “I was just screaming out, ‘Just find something to float on!’ " he recalls.
Then Brian got hit in the back of his head with debris, sending him underwater. His experience as a divemaster likely saved him.
“When I finally made it to the surface, I called out to her and she never responded,” he says. “Then I allowed my training to take over and just went into survival mode at that point. I was able to climb a tree, I don't know how I did it… Luckily that tree held and I stayed there until I was rescued at around 7 o'clock in the morning.”
Brian witnessed the man who drove him and Katheryn get swept away in the floodwater; he didn’t make it. Meanwhile, Brian and two other survivors from the flooding were taken to a shelter where they were examined in an ambulance. He didn't immediately go to a hospital because he wanted to wait for any updates about Katheryn’s whereabouts.
NEED TO KNOW
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Later in the afternoon, Brian finally sought treatment and received stitches at the hospital. That was when he got the news that the authorities had found Katheryn’s body. “She was right down about a quarter of a mile down the river from [where I was] on the river bank," he says. "She was deceased when they found her.”
In addition to Brian and their two daughters, Katheryn left behind a grandson. In the immediate aftermath of Katheryn’s death, her daughter Victoria shared a statement with PEOPLE last year that highlighted her mother’s' dedication to helping children.
"Trying to figure out our lives without her is a possibility we never planned to face and we will always miss her," Victoria wrote, in part. "I know it won’t ease the burden of grief any, but I want the parents of those kids who also passed to know that there’s a momma up there helping them and giving them hugs until their parents get back to them.”
A week before the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, Brian sold the couple’s home in Cibolo, where they lived for six years. Before the disaster, he had planned to retire as an aircraft mechanic in three years. But after Katheryn died, he decided to leave his job and now travels the country in an RV as part of his recovery process.
“I do have flashbacks, especially when it's thunderstorming and stuff,” he says. “But it's all part of what she would say: You've got to face your fears, and don't let it stop you. She would want me to live. She would want me to travel and see the country that I defended because I spent all my time overseas. I never really got to spend a lot of time here in the States.”
He adds, “She was everything to me. After 30 years of being together, all of a sudden you're on your own… Now I tell everybody you got to get out and live life, man, because you never know.”
Read the full article here
