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There are depositions, police reports, interview recordings, Sunshine Law requests, emails and legal documents. Pratt’s girlfriend, Wendy Gray, is the keeper of the notebooks. She’s put them together, organized them, collated them and updated them. She helps Pratt, who has a brain injury, tell his story.

It starts in Camden County, at the Lake of the Ozarks, where Pratt was living his best life.

“I had every man’s dream,” Pratt says.

He had a log cabin on three acres near Sunrise Beach. An auto mechanic and dealer, Pratt restored and sold vintage cars and trucks. He had a successful business.

“It was perfect,” he says. “And it was all taken away from me.”

The trouble started on Dec. 16, 2011.

That’s when two men beat him in his driveway and then ran over him in their car. Pratt believes an ex-boyfriend of his daughter was one of the attackers. There’s no police report from that night because Pratt was knocked out. One of the men snuck up on him in the dark and hit him from behind.

“I don’t know how I made it up my driveway and into the house,” he says. “I couldn’t remember what happened for five or six months.”

A few days after the attack, Pratt made his way to Gray’s house in Ballwin. She sent him to the hospital to get checked out. In May 2012, he went to the Camden County Sheriff’s Department to tell them what happened. This is where things start to get convoluted.

If you believe the sheriff’s department and prosecutors, they conducted an investigation that couldn’t lead to charges because of the elapsed time and Pratt’s memory issues. If you believe Pratt and Gray, local officials covered up the crime because one of the assailants was related to a courthouse official.

When no charges were filed, Pratt filed a lawsuit against his alleged assailants, seeking to recoup his medical bills and business losses. When that case was dismissed, he filed a federal lawsuit against various Camden County officials, including the sheriff.

Here’s how Pratt’s attorney described the alleged conspiracy in federal court records:

“Plaintiff discovered that members of the Camden County Sheriff’s Department intentionally hid the identity of the assailants, intentionally failed to follow proper protocol in investigating the crime against him and did so in an attempt to hide both the crime and their conspiracy to fraudulently conceal such a crime.”

The “shocking” information, the attorney wrote, came to light in a deposition for Pratt’s lawsuit. A former Camden County law enforcement officer revealed that she was ordered to not investigate the attack because “of the familial relation between the clerk for the circuit judges and one of the individuals accused of the crime, and that other officers were doing the same.”

It’s a damning allegation. And if you see the voluminous evidence obtained by Pratt and Gray over the past several years, there’s enough information to make for a potentially damning day in court.

But that day may not come. So said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in a July ruling that likely ended Pratt’s quest for justice. Pratt doesn’t have standing to sue, the court said, because federal case law says a “crime victim cannot sue a government official for failing to prosecute his assailant.”

It’s a version of “qualified immunity,” that broad legal protection the federal courts apply to police and other public officials to protect them from lawsuits in cases of alleged malfeasance.

“I was shocked when they came down with the decision,” says Pratt’s New York-based appeals attorney, John Siskopoulos. “If you don’t have a legal avenue for people like Jeff, their case goes nowhere.”

The ordeal cost Pratt his business, his dream home and his savings. He struggles to let it go.

“I never got justice,” he says. “It destroyed me.”

Pratt, who lives in Wildwood now, plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the odds that the country’s high court will take the case are stacked against him. Sometimes, it seems, you simply can’t take on City Hall. And that, says Pratt’s attorney, should worry victims of crime everywhere.

“If you expand the concept of qualified immunity to such an extent, some government officials are going to have a god complex,” Siskopoulos says. “It’s a dangerous place to be.”