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ST. LOUIS — Four years of Roger Engelhardt’s work life can be told in 18 boxes of documents the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has been trying to keep secret. Engelhardt, a former lieutenant in the department, was fired because of what’s in the boxes. He wants copies of the documents.

The city keeps saying no.

This week, he fired off his latest Sunshine Law request seeking some of the documents. He’s sent several such requests over the last year, each one denied in one capacity or another.

This time, his request is informed by recently unsealed court depositions in a federal civil rights lawsuit. The depositions were of three key figures in the investigations that led to his firing — Lt. Col. Michael Sack, Lt. J.D. McCloskey, and Sgt. Tonya Porter.

The reason there are 18 boxes of documents, according to the depositions, is that there were actually three investigations, each of them overlapping.

One was an audit of the Force Investigative Unit that Engelhardt led. That audit, first revealed in my column in January, outlined alleged errors in all 50 police shooting or jail death investigations led by the FIU during its first four years of existence. Many of the errors are procedural in nature. None of the shooting investigations have been re-opened.

The city hid the document from attorneys who had filed lawsuits related to some of those investigations. A federal judge unsealed the audit in September in a lawsuit brought by the family of Mansur Ball-Bey, who was killed by city police in August 2015.

Other documents in the boxes center around an internal affairs investigation of Engelhardt for allegedly getting paid for private security work while he was on the clock for the police department.

The third investigation is a criminal probe of Engelhardt’s alleged double-dipping. According to Sack’s deposition, he would give documents to the FBI when they asked for records.

The FBI never charged Engelhardt with a crime, and the statute of limitations has passed.

The new information in the depositions reinforces what Engelhardt has been saying since the investigations of him and his unit started in 2018: the police department didn’t follow its own procedures for investigating an officer. That’s one reason why he’s fought to open the records, even though some of them are critical of his work running the Force Investigative Unit.

If an officer is investigated by internal affairs, he’s supposed to receive notice. Engelhardt didn’t receive such notice until two years after the investigation started. It was signed by Sack, showing a date in 2018 but listing a rank of lieutenant colonel for him. But Sack was a major, a lower rank, when the investigation began. Engelhardt has accused Sack of back-dating the document.

Also, police regulations say there should be an incident report outlining the beginning of a criminal investigation into a police officer, and the inquiry should be separate from a personnel investigation. This is to protect police officers from incriminating themselves in a criminal investigation.

There is no such incident report. And Sack testified in the Ball-Bey case that the investigations overlapped.

These revelations about the scattered nature of the FIU Audit could help Ball-Bey’s family convince a jury that the city has a pattern of failure when it comes to police investigations. The case is scheduled to go to trial next year.

But Sack’s deposition also highlights a discrepancy Engelhardt noted in state court records more than a year ago. When Engelhardt was fired, he applied for and received unemployment benefits. The city later appealed those benefits. During that dispute, Engelhardt was able to question Sack, who denied being involved in any interviews related to Engelhardt’s firing.

But in his deposition in the Ball-Bey case, Sack says he personally directed the investigation and conducted some interviews.

“He lied in his testimony in my unemployment hearing,� Engelhardt said this week in an interview. “How did you forget that you interviewed these people? It’s a spiderweb of lies. It never stops.�

The irony is that Sack now has a lawsuit against the city, and he alleges his own spider web of malfeasance. Sack was passed over by Mayor Tishaura O. Jones for police chief, and he later filed a discrimination lawsuit, alleging the mayor violated city procedures and discriminated against him because he’s white.

Sack’s lawsuit is ongoing, and so is Engelhardt’s effort to get his job back. Both cases suffer from the same delays, most of them caused intentionally by the city counselor’s office, the same office that spent years hiding the audit of police shootings.

As he seeks documents from the city, Engelhardt is still awaiting the results of the civil service hearing in which he challenged his firing. One of the reasons he was allegedly fired — taking too long to produce reports — is now a key city tactic in the battle against him. The investigation — or investigations — into Engelhardt began in 2018. He wasn’t fired until 2021. His civil service hearing was completed in March of this year.

He’s still waiting for an outcome.

“If you’re looking at track records, my track record is way better than theirs,� Engelhardt says. “They violated every rule from the special order about how they’re supposed to do investigations.�