Judge rules against government in secretive police chase

Three young people left with life-threatening injuries after 'party pursuit'

A tribal police department and the federal government lost their motion to dismiss a lawsuit against a police officer who conducted a high-speed chase near Flandreau that ended in tragedy.

The government had sought judgment in favor of itself and Officer Rob Neuenfeldt, who was chief of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Police Department when the June 18, 2017 chase occurred. In rejecting the government’s motion for summary judgment, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Piersol concluded that issues of fact should be decided at a trial.

A key issue to decide at trial is to determine how negligent Neuenfeldt was in the accident compared to the driver of the pickup truck he was pursuing, Tahlen Bourassa.

“As the court has already discussed at length, there are questions of fact in this case relating to causation and whether the negligence of Bourassa was a superseding cause of plaintiffs’ injuries,” Piersol wrote.

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