Attorneys for the Rushville Volunteer Fire Department and Sheridan County Sheriff Terry Robbins have filed responses in a civil suit blaming them and others of negligently setting a grass fire last spring that burned a man in the border town of Whiteclay.

Bryan Bluebird, an Oglala Sioux Tribe member who lives in South Dakota on the adjacent Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, suffered burns over 25% of his body in the March 6 fire.

He’s seeking unspecified damages from Sheridan County, the fire department, the village of Rushville and various elected officials including Robbins for medical costs, loss of earning capacity and pain and suffering.

His attorney, Tom White of Omaha, has said Bluebird — an Army veteran who worked laying cinder blocks, branding cattle and fixing cars — has undergone several surgeries and skin grafts with some of his fingers fused together.

The prescribed burn in a grass field on the edge of Whiteclay was planned to reduce the threat of an uncontrolled wildfire later in the year. Bluebird says he was asleep in the field and awoke as the fire burned his hands, face, left leg, lower back and abdomen.

His lawsuit alleges that the fire department and others were negligent by failing to spot him before they started the fire, and by igniting it on a dangerously windy day.

In their court filings in response to the suit, Rushville and Sheridan County officials argue that Bluebird’s injuries were caused by his own negligence, and that they can’t be held liable for “simple or ordinary negligence” because they were acting within the scope of their duties as firefighters and public safety officials.

Attorney Jeffrey Nix wrote that “the alleged harm was not due to the volunteers’ willful or criminal misconduct, gross negligence, reckless misconduct or a conscience, flagrant indifference of the rights or safety” of Bluebird.

Whiteclay…an unincorporated community of about a dozen residents…has been the subject of heated debate for years because its 4 stores with beer licenses sell the equivalent of more than 4-million cans of beer each year, most of it to residents of the officially dry reservation.

Some of those who buy beer there go to the field that was burned to drink or to sleep after drinking, but Bluebird insists he had not been drinking.

In February, the Oglala Sioux Tribe filed a half-billion dollar lawsuit against the 4 Whiteclay stores and the brewers and distributors who service them…arguing they sold alcohol to Pine Ridge residents, knowing they would consume and resell it illegally on the reservation.

Bluebird wasn’t involved in that lawsuit and said he doesn’t blame the beer stores for his injuries, but activists who have tried to limit alcohol sales in Whiteclay say such a case was inevitable, given the number of people who loiter around the stores and sleep in nearby fields.