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ST. LOUIS — Get fire insurance.

That was Lt. Roger Engelhardt’s advice to Dr. Michael Graham, St. Louis’ chief medical examiner. Graham had shown the detective Mansur Ball-Bey’s severed spine.

Graham held part of the spine in his left hand; the other part, completely disconnected, was in his right hand. It was August 2015, just a few days after Ball-Bey had been shot and killed running from police officers after a SWAT raid in the Fountain Park neighborhood.

Engelhardt was the head of the Force Investigative Unit, which investigates shootings by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. He knew he had a problem. Two white officers, Kyle Chandler and Ronald Vaughan, had shot at Ball-Bey, an 18-year-old Black man, after a foot chase. In interviews with Engelhardt, they said Ball-Bey ran through a gangway and collapsed in a front yard after being shot in the backyard.

But Graham had just told The New York Times that couldn’t have happened. “I would have expected him to go to the ground right away,� Graham said.

That’s because Ball-Bey’s spine had been severed after he was shot in the back.

The shooting came a year after Michael Brown had died in Ferguson. The St. Louis region was still on edge, with regular protests in the city and county. Then-police Chief Sam Dotson called Engelhardt after reading the Times story and asked him to get to the bottom of it.

On Wednesday, Engelhardt was on the witness stand in a federal wrongful death lawsuit against Chandler filed by Mansur’s father. Engelhardt recounted the episode under questioning from one of Ball-Bey’s attorneys, . The insurance line was a joke, Engelhardt said, but there was a serious connotation behind it.

If the public knew that the police version of events and the medical examiner’s version were incompatible, Engelhardt feared, there would be unrest in the streets.

“They can’t both be true,� Engelhardt said.

The different versions matter because if Ball-Bey collapsed in the front yard of the home on Walton Avenue right after he was shot in the back by Chandler, then he was clearly unarmed. Ball-Bey’s pistol, which he was carrying while running, was found in the backyard, next to a dumpster in an alley. That’s where he tossed it, testified Officer Richard Booker Jr., an off-duty city police officer who witnessed the chase and heard the shots that killed Ball-Bey. The dumpster is at least 35 feet from where Chandler says Ball-Bey was when he was shot.

Jurors got out of their chairs on Wednesday and watched Khazaeli walk out of the courtroom with a tape measure, demonstrating the various distances that help poke holes in the officers’ version of events. Chandler and Vaughan aren’t police officers anymore; they were fired in 2021 after accusations of dishonesty during internal investigations.

Back in 2015, Engelhardt’s meeting with Graham came after the medical examiner had proposed a possible new theory, which would differ from what he initially told the Times. Maybe the spine had just been injured in the shooting, and later severed itself as Ball-Bey was running or police were arresting him. To test his new theory, Graham had called the funeral home and ordered Ball-Bey’s body, which had already been released to his family, returned so he could conduct a second autopsy.

“I was really surprised,� Engelhardt said. “That never happens. Never.�

But it did. And after Graham’s adjusted theory and later police officer interviews created doubt, then-Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce declined to prosecute the case, though she made clear she didn’t believe the shooting was “justified.�

Ball-Bey’s father, Dennis, hopes to get some measure of accountability from the lawsuit, which he filed in 2018. The case has just now gone to trial after years of delays, many of them caused by the city counselor’s office, which is representing Chandler.

Whether Ball-Bey gets justice for his son will be up to an all-white jury of six men and three women. If there’s one thing that’s already been proven in the case, it’s that the process by which police shootings are investigated in St. Louis is broken.

On the night of the Ball-Bey shooting, police interviewed Booker, the Black off-duty cop who was a witness, for two hours and videotaped the conversation. Chandler and Vaughan wouldn’t be interviewed until two days later. The interviews lasted about an hour and were in Engelhardt’s office. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were not videotaped.

The trial is expected to last at least through Friday. The case, argued Jack Waldron, one of the attorneys representing Ball-Bey, comes down to whether the jury believes Ball-Bey was holding a gun and pointing it at police when they shot him.

“He was running away,� Waldron said in his opening statement, pointing out the gun was found 164 feet from where Ball-Bey died. “He was unarmed and he was no threat to anybody.�