BRIAN HEAD — For almost three years, from the time he started the 71,000-acre Brian Head Fire on June 17, 2017, until the criminal and civil cases against him were resolved, Robert Lyman wasn’t allowed to speak publicly, under the advice of his lawyers.
However, Lyman is now free to share his story and recently did so during multiple in-person interviews with St. George News / Cedar City News, the contents of which are being published as a four-part series commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Brian Head Fire. This is part two. To read part one, click here.
As previously reported, Lyman’s criminal case was ultimately resolved with a misdemeanor reckless burning charge being dropped by prosecutors in February 2020. A couple weeks later, Lyman entered a no contest plea to not obtaining a burn permit during a closed fire season, a class B misdemeanor, and was ordered to pay a $500 fine, plus community service.
That plea was held in abeyance pending Lyman’s successful completion of the 50 service hours and other terms of the agreement, which he fulfilled 12 months later, thereby keeping the charge from going on his record.
Lyman says he’s actually somewhat disappointed the case ended up not going to trial, as it prevented him from being vindicated in court.
“I knew I was going to be found not guilty. My trial was going to be my way of getting my story out,” Lyman said. “They took it away from me by dropping the charges.”
Iron County Attorney Chad Dotson, who was elected in 2018, inherited Lyman’s case from his predecessor, Scott Garrett.
In an interview with Cedar City News, Dotson clarified that the reckless burning charge was dropped so as not to preclude the payment of restitution claims.
“While we were pursuing the criminal case, the Attorney General’s Office had an open civil claim,” he explained. “One of the things that we discovered was that if we had pursued the reckless burning charge and he was convicted of that, there’s a clause in the insurance agreement, that if somebody acts willfully, intentionally or recklessly, then they don’t have to cover it.”
“The best outcome for the criminal case was to get as many individuals paid something towards their losses,” Dotson added. “It would have been counterproductive to get a conviction on a misdemeanor and then lose that funding source with the insurance, and so we fashioned something that allowed him to at least admit to some some fault for not complying with the permit process but also allow the insurance to still go through and pay back individuals who had lost things with the civil case.”
“I was happy to learn that there are people here in Iron County who lost cabins who did get a good chunk of money from that source and that settlement with the Attorney General’s Office,” Dotson added. “It was not an ideal outcome, but it was the best outcome that we could get, to try and make the victims whole.”
Dotson also pointed out the fact that both of the charges filed against Lyman were misdemeanors, which he said gave the prosecutors very little leverage with which to bargain.
“So even if you convict him of the max, the reality is, he’s probably not going to do any jail time,” Dotson said. “He’s going to be fined and just going to do community service, which is what he ended up doing as a part of the plea agreement.”
“We had a lot to lose if we convicted him of the reckless burning,” he added. “And so it kind of was resolved in a way that initially wasn’t how I’d thought about or planned.”
Dotson said that despite the intense public interest in the case, outside pressure was not a factor in the decision whether to pursue or drop the charges against Lyman.
“We have to make those determinations, of course, without passion or prejudice,” he said. “Public clamor didn’t have a bearing on how we pursued the case.”
“You have to go with where the evidence is, and in the laws that you have – the statute and the elements,” Dotson added. “If this was an arsonist or somebody who was out there setting fires on purpose … I mean, that’s a different situation than what we had with Mr. Lyman, who was otherwise an upstanding citizen.”
Although Lyman said he’s glad to finally have the litigation behind him, he still feels the weight of being vilified in the court of public opinion.
Of particular concern to him, he says, was then-Gov. Gary Herbert’s tweet dated June 20, 2017, three days after the fire started. The tweet said: “Experts are confirming the #BrianHeadFire was started by a weed torch, used in dry conditions. A good reminder to be #firewise.”
Experts are confirming the #BrianHeadFire was started by a weed torch, used in dry conditions. A good reminder to be #firewise. #utpol pic.twitter.com/LE8wwNgd2p
— Gary R. Herbert (@GovHerbert) June 20, 2017
Lyman said Herbert’s tweet made him sound highly irresponsible.
“When they get that in their mind, some guy up here with a weed torch, which is a flame thrower in the mountains … it horrified me,” Lyman said, adding that he hadn’t been using any kind of torch but rather started the fire with a lighter and some charcoal lighter fluid, with a running water hose in hand.
“When I heard that, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Now, with the governor putting that out there, I knew what people would think. I thought the same thing.”
“Let’s say that it was somebody else up here that started the fire,” Lyman said. “If I would have heard that he was using a weed torch, I’d have been mad, too. But if I would have known, you know, if you let it all come out how it really happened, I’d have been very forgiving. And I think other people would, too. But the problem was, I couldn’t talk. I’m just watching all these lies come about.”
Lyman cited several examples of baseless and untrue rumors that were circulated.
“There’s all these rumors out there that I was warned and told,” he said. “There’s rumors that I was given a ticket by the BLM the day before, but I burned anyway. There’s a rumor that says I tried to get a license but couldn’t get a license. But I burned anyway.”
Lyman said yet another rumor falsely claimed he had been drinking and had told an officer to “get the hell off” his property.
Kacie Carballo of Parowan’s Dry Lakes Ranch said although she and her husband were among the many landowners impacted by the fire, she doesn’t harbor any ill will toward Lyman.
“We lost a couple hundred acres of private land and also quite a lot of forest that we own the grazing rights to,” she said. Still, she doesn’t believe Lyman deserved the treatment he received.
“He really was treated so poorly by the community members in our area, by the media, by everyone but a handful of us,” she said. “It was almost a lynch mob.”
Carballo says it’s decades of poor forest management that are actually to blame.
“In my mind, the reality is our our lands right now, especially where there’s been bark beetle kill, are a tinderbox,” she told Cedar City News. “And any one of us is responsible at any time. We’ve suppressed fires for over a century or so, and it’s to the point where it has become so overgrown that now, if they’re not small fires, they’re catastrophic, no matter what the source of the fire is.”
“It was bound to happen,” Carballo added.
Carballo said she’s glad Lyman is now finally able to go public with his side of the story and hopes that others can empathize with him.
“I think it’s a miracle that he’s as mentally strong as he is, because anybody else wouldn’t have been able to make it through this ordeal,” she said.
Lyman, who said he was grateful to have received some support from people like Carballo, noted that it was the governor’s “weed torch” comment that really got a large section of the public riled up.
“It made it look like it was a beautification project, you know, and not a defensible space project,” he said. “Like I was using a weed torch to burn my weeds. Yeah. Everything up here is a weed.”
Sheldon Wimmer, a retired BLM wildland fire management officer, said he confirmed after visiting Lyman’s cabin, “It’s nicely vegetated; there’s not a lot of unwanted vegetation. He was just burning some of that extra slash that had accumulated on his property.”
“In my mind, what he was doing was he was fireproofing his cabin,” Wimmer said. “He was using firewise principles to remove vegetation around his cabin, so if there were a fire to come through there, it would be safe.”
Private investigator Chris Bertram, who was hired by Lyman’s defense team, also said Lyman was trying to follow established fire safety principles in order to create a defensible space around his cabin.
But after the governor’s tweet and other social media posts went out, he said misinformation and rumors quickly began to spread.
That created issues, Bertram said, when he later went around talking to people about the case.
“As I interviewed people, I almost (always) started out with educating them, that the information that they had seen in social media and other news information was not accurate, and it changed and tainted what they believed about what happened,” Bertram noted.
For his part, Lyman said he simply wants to set the record straight.
“I don’t want it to be presented that I have sour grapes against police or firefighters,” he said. “I respect law enforcement. My dad was a cop. If these guys would have come and told me something, I’d have said, ‘Yes, sir.’”
Lyman said that the night before the fire started, he had cooked tinfoil dinners over a campfire in front of the cabin, just as he had done countless other times. A deputy with the Brian Head Town Marshal’s Office had even driven by on nearby state Route 143 and given a friendly wave, Lyman recalled.
“I honestly didn’t know that there was a burning season,” Lyman said. “I didn’t know. Now, is ignorance of the law an excuse? No, it’s not. But I’ve seen people burn. We’ve burned. I’ve had 1,001 campfires right out there in front, forever. I’ve had some blazing campfires. We’ve got a lot of wood here. We have good campfires right there, where we sit around, roast marshmallows. Nobody has ever said a word, ever. I’ve never had a complaint. I’ve never had anybody say one thing about our burns.”
Brian Head Marshal Dan Benson clarified that situation by saying the law does allow people to have cooking fires on their property.
“A cooking fire at your cabin with running water is completely legal,” Benson said. “You don’t need a permit. You don’t need permission, you don’t need anything. But when you start burning, you know, slash and piles, that’s a whole ‘nother story.”
Benson said Lyman should have followed the process of calling about obtaining a burn permit, adding that the application would have been rejected under the conditions that existed at that time.
“What we’re going through right now, we’re in the same stage of fire restriction as we were then,” Benson said earlier this week. “ The permit would have been denied for sure, because that was on a ‘red flag’ day because of the winds that were expected and dry air. So yeah, he would have been denied, which that process would have prevented (the fire).”
Lyman said he doesn’t see much difference between a cooking fire and a non-cooking fire.
“Whenever I do have a campfire, where do I get my wood?” he asked. “I don’t go down to the Maverik and buy firewood. I just gather slash. I burn it, just like I did to create a fire space. Really, there’s no difference. So the law that says you can have a campfire but not a controlled burn, maybe the law needs to be changed. That’s the focus I want to take.”
“It’s especially important that people know that I was acting on the conditions of the mountain,” Lyman added. “The burning season in Iron County is April through May, but it’s predicated on conditions down in the valley. It’s a bit different here (in the mountains) during April and May.”
“And honestly, I didn’t know I had to have a permit, because we had burned all the time,” Lyman added. “Why didn’t they say something? Because they thought that I had a campfire. According to the law, campfires are permissible.”
For reference, the Stage 1 fire restrictions listed on the UtahFireInfo website specifically read as follows: “No open fires of any kind except within established public facilities in improved campgrounds, picnic areas. -OR- In permanently constructed fire pits at private homes where running water is present.”
Benson said that the drought that has persisted for the past several years has created some extremely dry conditions, even though it might not outwardly appear to be the case.
“It’s interesting to me, we were so dry, that we were putting spot fires out on one side of people’s homes and then you walk around to the north side of the home and there’s three feet of snow piled up,” he said, adding that plows also had to clear snow off the roads in order for fire crews to access certain sections of the Brian Head Fire.
“Just because there’s still snow on the trees doesn’t mean that the fuel isn’t dry,” Benson added.
Ed. Note: This is the second of a four-part series marking the anniversary of the Brian Head Fire. Check back on St. George News / Cedar City News later this week for the other two installments.
Read more: ‘I wanted to tell the world’: After 5 years, man who started massive Brian Head Fire shares story
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