Some lives are upended gradually, giving the mind time to adjust; others, in a flash of circumstance so incomprehensible that reality shatters like a puzzle, requiring years to be put back together again. Jarmon has some of the puzzle pieces in his mind, but—seven months after thehistoric Big Sandy Creek flood—the picture is far from complete. Some pieces fit; others don’t. Some stand alone, too painful to examine, too nightmarish to believe they occurred. 

A handful of Sandy Creek Ranches residents reported seeing an eerie white fog on the ground before the creek turned deadly. For Jarmon, the only clue that something was amiss was the unsettling sound of running water. It was coming from somewhere beneath him, like a garden hose on full blast. He noticed it sometime after 2 a.m. on July 5, 2025. 

A few hours earlier, Jarmon had been watching July 4 fireworks with his daughter, Felicity, at Volente Beach, a Lake Travis water park where Felicity worked as a lifeguard. It had begun drizzling on their drive home, but not in a fashion that seemed out of the ordinary. By midnight, Jarmon was fast asleep, barely aware of the modest rain outside. 

Now lying in bed, his mind half awake, processing the noise, Jarmon thought a water line must have broken. A powerfulboom, the sound of something large slamming into the side of his house, extinguished that illusion. Now Jarmon was wide awake. He stood up and looked out his bedroom window. “That’s when I saw my boat float past the house,” Jarmon said. “I was like, ‘Whoa!,’ and I immediately woke my wife up.”

In the next piece of the puzzle, Jarmon’s wife and children—fifteen-year-old Braxton, sixteen-year-old Felicity, and their stepmother, 54-year-old Alissa Martin—had gathered in the living room. Jarmon was wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt. The next few minutes were a nightmarish blur. The teens panicking. Screams of horror. The thuds of heavy objects slamming against the exterior walls. The tornado-like roar of water engulfing the home and tearing its way inside, its ferocity almost malevolent in nature. At one point, Jarmon looked out his sliding-glass back door and noticed that the bottom of his hot tub was at eye level, bobbing in the water. His heart sank. He was 150 feet from dry land, but he might as well have been on a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean. 

With each passing moment, his family’s situation grew increasingly perilous. “Once the house started moving, then that’s when it got real,” Jarmon said. Somehow, amid the chaos, Felicity had the presence of mind to record a short video of the scene and send it to her boyfriend. Lately, in his effort to put the puzzle back together again, Jarmon has begun watching the recording. As the camera sweeps the room, brackish water can be seen coming through the floor. Despite the noise of the house coming apart, Jarmon’s voice, steady and matter-of-fact, can be heard saying, “We are moving, guys.” With the sound of objects crashing around her, Martin’s voice can be heard screaming, “Oh s—!” Then the video goes black. 

Around this time, the family retreated to Jarmon and Martin’s bedroom. Huddled together, they heard the beams beneath their feet begin to groan. Jarmon remembers the floor “buckling.” Moments later, the windows shattered and water crashed into the room. The couple’s king-size mattress was tossed into the air. A couch was flung across the room like furniture in a doll house. As the floor opened wide, a sinkhole formed, its force inescapable, a vortex swallowing everything it touched. As he clung desperately to the bedroom door, Jarmon watched Braxton disappear beneath the floor first. An incoming sophomore who played bass clarinet in the Glenn High School marching band and was a defensive end on the football field, the athletic teenager vanished in an instant. Felicity, an avid swimmer who wanted to become a veterinarian one day, was pulled into the water next, disappearing beneath the house just like her brother. Martin followed both of the children. Many images haunt Jarmon, but one in particular remains seared in his memory: seeing (and hearing) his wife take a deep breath as her body was pulled under the water.  “My poor wife,” he said. “I guess I heard her take her last breath.”

Seconds later, Jarmon was struck by a falling dresser and found himself underwater too. Thrashing about, he realized his leg was trapped between two concrete strips—part of the home’s foundation. Jarmon remembers being fully conscious of his circumstance, acutely aware that he had seconds to live. “I thought, ‘This is it—I’m done,’ ” he said. “I felt like I died under that water.” But he didn’t. Somehow—perhaps as the house continued shifting or when the pressure inside the structure equalized—Jarmon managed to free his leg and claw his way back to the surface, fighting for breath in a narrow pocket of air near his bedroom ceiling. With the house still moving, Jarmon punched a hole in the ceiling and partially pulled himself out of the water. 

The next thing Jarmon remembers is looking up and seeing stars. The home had split open as it floated down Big Sandy Creek, which had transformed into a viscous wall of churning debris. He pulled himself onto what remained of the roof and rode that until it broke apart in the fast-moving current. The air was filled with the sounds of violent demolition. Trees snapped around him. The riverbank collapsed in on itself, dislodging boulders that smashed into the water below. “I’m swimming in a raging river,” Jarmon said. “Trucks are passing me, cars, and as soon as I turned around to see, this big cedar tree mows right over my face.” 

Jarmon’s body was being sliced open and pummeled by debris. On two occasions he managed to grab hold of a passing tree. Both times the tree snapped in half, sending him back under the water, scrambling for something else to cling to. At the surface, he screamed out incoherently, his body expelling primal cries of pain and panic. Nobody could hear him. He was nearly entombed and utterly alone. He didn’t think of his family, he said. He already knew they were gone. 

Eventually, he spotted a piece of PVC pipe wrapped around a telephone pole. He managed to grab onto it as he passed, confident that the telephone pole would outlast the deluge. He was right. When sheriff’s deputies in a boat finally rescued him hours later, he was naked and clinging to the pipe, his mind barely intact. Today, the same location is once more an empty field. 

He has replayed his family’s final minutes in his mind more times than he can count. Dissecting his daughter’s last video has helped him put the puzzle back together again as best he can. Like so many otherspulled into the raging torrents that washed over Central Texas last summer, he has realized that his fate was measured in inches and milliseconds, coincidence and chance. Whether someone was a child at a summer camp or a husband asleep next to his wife a hundred miles away, once the water arrived, Jarmon believes, nobody was truly in control. There is heartbreak in this knowledge, but also relief. “I’ve realized I’m not in control of other people’s destiny,” he said. “This life is my story, but it ain’t really my story, because I’m not the one writing it.”

Seven months after he lost his family, Jarmon has returned to the lot overlooking Big Sandy Creek, the same place where decades of his life washed away in a matter of minutes. His physical wounds have mostly healed, but his leg, the one that was trapped beneath his house, still suffers from nerve damage and probably always will. He lost a brother to suicide before the flood, but he refuses to succumb to despair, he said, by “drinking myself to death.” He doesn’t feel sorry for himself, but he sometimes wonders who wrote his story and why it took such a brutal turn. He’s not a regular churchgoer, but these days he often finds himself “chatting with God.” “I’m never going to forget what happened, and I’m never going to outrun it,” he said. “The only way to really deal with this is one day at a time.”

Before the flood, he was a proud father, ferrying his kids between an endless series of social events, practices, and games. “I should’ve had a locker over there at the school, I was there so much,” Jarmon said. Sweet and silly, Braxton was as passionate about the outdoors as he was about football and music. His older sister, Felicity,was described in her obituary as “immensely creative,” an artist who expressed herself through sculpture and drawing. Martin was just as active as Jarmon and helped run his pressure-washing business. “Our lives were nonstop all day long,” he said. 

The hardest part of his new life is the lack of routine, the places where structure has been replaced by endless time. When he wakes up each morning, nobody is asking for his help. There are no appointments to get to, no rides to offer, no kids to hug goodbye. But there are difficult reminders of his old life everywhere, such as the yellow school bus that stops down the street from his property, the same one his daughter exited each afternoon. Jarmon sees the bus’s door swing open, sees the kids emerge one by one. Felicity is never among them.  

For now, he lives in an RV; all that remains of his old house is a concrete slab. Stripped clean by the flood, the land is dusty and mostly treeless, like a construction zone where nothing is being built. With thehelp of friends, he hopes to rebuild. His deck is gone, replaced by a plastic table that someone found among the debris after the flood. Most days you can find him rocking in a deck chair beside the table, beneath the same tree that used to shade his home, a bag of candy and a packet of Lucky Strikes beside him. 

The barbecue pit is gone. The hot tub is too, and so are his neighbors, many of whom were killed in the flood (it left ten people dead,according to Travis County). The memories are not. “I could never leave this place,” he said as he lounged beneath the tree, his uneasy eyes gazing down at Big Sandy Creek. “Being here makes it easier for me. My kids, they grew up here. When I brought them home from the hospital, this is where I brought them.”

Braxton was found a few hundred yards from this place. He would’ve turned sixteen in January. His stepmother was found the day after the flood about a mile from the house. Felicity was found farther away, her body hidden beneath a twisted pile of muddy debris that had accumulated under a bridge. It took two weeks of searching on foot to locate her, but her father never gave up. 

Today, he takes comfort in knowing exactly where both of his children are at all times. They’re buried in a cemetery a few miles from his property. Jarmon visits them from time to time, envisioning the day he’ll be laid to rest in the same plot. He has a special place picked out for himself, the only place he knows he truly belongs anymore. “I’m going to be right there in between them,” he said, a look of calm finally falling across his face.